By
Amanda Arden, Amy Westerby
/ CBS News
A group of American researchers believes it may be days away from finding what remains of the missing plane of legendary aviator Amelia Earhart off a remote island in the South Pacific.
An expedition team led by Steve Schultz from Purdue University and Richard Pettigrew from the Archaeological Legacy Institute on Wednesday began the painstaking search for what could be Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10-E plane.
"We're looking at the land, we're looking for artifacts that might relate to Amelia Earhart," Pettigrew told CBS News on Wednesday.
"We're still very much in the data-gathering phase," Schultz added.
Members of the expedition are searching a lagoon off the coast of Nikumaroro. They are focused on inspecting what is known as the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly that has been visible in aerial photos dating back to 1938 but was first noticed in satellite imagery in 2020. That satellite imagery is what inspired the new expedition.
The search area is so remote, it took the 17-member expedition team five days at sea to reach it.
However, the team is confident it will be able to say in just a matter of days whether they have found Earhart's plane.
"Our next step is complete analysis of the data that we gathered and then to begin using a hydraulic dredge to remove sediment from the bottom," Pettigrew said.
Earhart went missing on July 2, 1937, while attempting to become the first person to fly around the equator. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished 22,000 miles into their expedition.
Nikumaroro is part of the archipelago country of Kiribati, which is located about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. It's about 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, which, according to researchers, was the final destination of Earhart and Noonan's journey around the equator.
Their disappearance has become one of the world's greatest mysteries.
"We're the only people who have put together a plan to do something like that," Pettigrew said. "So it's entirely new."
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