An expedition to find evidence of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane near a remote island in the South Pacific has come up empty, researchers said Sunday.
Researchers from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University embarked this month on the Taraia Object expedition in Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in the Phoenix Islands belonging to the Republic of Kiribati.
The team sought to identify an anomaly first seen in satellite images in 2020. Experts have long suspected Nikumaroro as the landing site of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, who disappeared in July 1937.
However, the expedition “found no conclusive evidence to confirm a hypothesis that wreckage” from Earhart’s plane was “in a lagoon on a remote atoll in the South Pacific,” the university said in a news release.
“We think it’s most likely that the object was a collection of debris that accumulated here,” Rick Pettigrew, ALI’s executive director, said in a video message.
The expedition determined that the anomaly was most “likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandpit.” When the team arrived, much of the “debris had fragmented and washed away.” What was left was a Y-shaped segment that was just a small fraction of the anomaly’s original size observed via satellite.
The anomaly’s reflective surface, which was “long associated with the idea that the object was a metallic substance,” was found to be a carbonate veneer, meaning it had a layer of carbon-rich sediment.
“We accomplished our goal to determine what the Taraia Object was,” Pettigrew said. “Our team remains in great spirits and proud of what was accomplished.”
Earhart was seeking to be the first woman to fly around the world when she and Noonan disappeared in their Lockheed Electra 10-E.
A U.S. Coast Guard ship lost contact with the pair the morning of July 2, 1937, as they tried to fly to Howland Island, about 400 miles northwest of Nikumaroro.
The expedition to find Earhart’s plane launched from Tarawa in the Republic of Kiribati on Oct. 6 and traveled for five days by sea to Nikumaroro.
While it didn’t crack one of the world’s greatest mysteries, the expedition said the effort strongly supports the broader castaway hypothesis — a theory that Earhart and Noonan didn’t crash into the sea but landed on the flat reef of Nikumaroro and were marooned.
Some artifacts found on the island indicate Earhart and Noonan’s plane may have landed there, including glass bottles from the 1930s and a woman’s makeup compact, the expedition said.
It said it did find “numerous artifacts through both maritime and terrestrial archaeology efforts, including a steel tube about 30 inches long discovered in the lagoon near the Taraia Peninsula,” which will be further studied.
“Amelia Earhart never gave up — she kept pushing boundaries and flying into the unknown,” Steve Schultz, Purdue’s general counsel and an expedition member, said in a statement. “That same fire fuels our search. She kept flying, and we will keep searching.”