Researchers have begun to search for the remnants of Amelia Earhart’s plane on a remote Pacific Island.
A group from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University will search Nikumaroro Island for wreckage after satellite imagery appears to show remains of a plane’s tail and wing.
Earhart, her co-pilot Fred Noonan and their plane vanished in 1937 as they attempted to fly around the world.
Earhart spoke to the US Coast Guard and said she wasn’t able to find Howland Island before they lost communication.
Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) at Purdue, suspects Earhart and Noonan may have miscalculated and ended up on Nikumaroro Island instead of Howland Island, which lies further north.
They said satellite imagery shows objects that they believe are the remains of the plane’s tail, wing, and body sitting just metres from the shoreline.
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The team is expected to search the remote island for around five days, but they could encounter Coconut crabs – giant land crabs which are known to feast on small mammals.
To be safe, they will sleep on the research vessel at night to avoid the crabs.
The crabs can have a leg span of up to three feet and can climb trees and crack open coconuts, making them a bit of an issue for researchers.
There have been theories that Earhart and Noonan may have died when their plane crashed on the island, and their bodies were carried away by the crabs.
Human bones, discovered on the island in 1940, were forensically analysed in 2017 and found to have dimensions that matched Earhart’s bone lengths more closely than 99% of the population.
The period-specific artefacts, meanwhile, included a woman’s shoe, a compact case, a jar of freckle cream, and a medicine vial.
A further clue supporting the theory that Earhart’s journey ended on or near Nikumaroro is a photo taken just three months after the disappearance that appears to show the plane’s landing gear on the Nikumaroro reef.
A satellite image from 2020 shows what looks like the same object, which is known as the Bevington Object, in the same spot decades later.
Who was Amelia Earhart?
Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897 to a father who was a railroad lawyer, but later suffered from alcoholism, leaving the family often struggling for money.
She left junior college early to become a nurse’s aide and helped care for soldiers wounded in World War I and later started a premed programme, but quit after her parents asked her to move back home to California.
It was there she took her first flight as a passenger in 1920 and was entranced immediately, saying: ’As soon as I left the ground, I knew I had to fly.’
She started taking lessons, bought her first plane and by 1922 became the first woman to fly at 14,000 feet.
Earhart was chosen as the first female passenger to fly across the Atlantic in 1928, and became celebrity overnight.
Then in 1932 she became the first woman, and second person ever, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic.
It took her 15 hours, in which time she had to contend with mechanical issues, cold, tiredness and a drop of 3,000 feet on her descent.
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