As the 90th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance approaches, a new research team is launching a mission to resolve one of aviation’s most enduring enigmas. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937 while attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe at the equator.
The joint effort between Purdue University in Indiana and the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) is scheduled to depart on Saturday for Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll belonging to the Pacific nation of Kiribati. The team aims to investigate an anomaly detected in the island’s lagoon, which they believe may be the wreckage of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.
Nikumaroro has long been a focal point in the search for the aviator. Earhart and Noonan had departed from New Guinea on July 2, 1937, heading toward Howland Island for refueling before their final leg to Hawaii and California. Although a U.S. Coast Guard vessel reportedly intercepted Earhart’s radio signals and the aircraft was likely within visual range, she was never located. One of her final transmissions indicated she was following a north-south navigational line, a path that intersects with Nikumaroro, in a desperate bid to reach land before fuel exhaustion.
Since 1988, when researchers from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) first proposed that Earhart might have crash-landed on Nikumaroro’s fringing reef, the site has yielded various artifacts. These include sections of aircraft aluminum, plexiglass from a windscreen, a Pennsylvania-made zipper from the mid-1930s, fragments of a pocket knife listed in the aircraft’s inventory, and a woman’s shoe heel. Additionally, human remains found on the island in 1940 were originally thought to belong to the missing pair but were lost during the Pacific War.
Despite these finds, investigators have yet to uncover definitive proof linking the debris directly to the doomed flight. Expedition leader Rick Pettigrew, ALI executive director, argues that recent geological changes may have exposed the evidence. He points to satellite imagery captured after a powerful tropical cyclone swept through the central Pacific in 2015. The images reveal a shape off the Taraia promontory that Pettigrew describes as matching the dimensions and metallic reflectivity of the Electra’s fuselage and tail, likely partially buried in sediment within the lagoon.
The 17-member team plans to utilize drone photography, magnetometers, and sonar to scan the identified area. Should the data support the hypothesis, a hydraulic dredge will be employed to excavate the sediment.
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