In just a month’s time, one of the greatest modern mysteries could finally be solved – the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
Scientists are about to embark on an ambitious expedition to Nikumaroro, a five-mile-long island in the western Pacific Ocean.
There, they will investigate the Taraia Object, a ‘visual anomaly’ in a lagoon that they think could be Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra 10E plane.
Amelia Earhart was flying the aircraft with navigator Fred Noonan when it vanished near Howland Island on July 2, 1937.
At the time, she was attempting to become the first woman to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe.
What exactly went wrong, and where her plane landed, has been a mystery ever since – but experts think they’re on the verge of finally solving it.
Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), is part of the expedition team traveling to Nikumaroro Island.
‘Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,’ he said.
The ‘Taraia Object’ in a lagoon on Nikumaroro Island, first noticed in satellite imagery only five years ago, looks tantalizingly like an aircraft fuselage and tail
Mr Pettigrew said there’s an ‘extremely persuasive, multifaceted case’ that the final destination for Earhart and Noonan was Nikumaroro Island.
‘Confirming the plane wreckage there would be the smoking-gun proof,’ he added.
The three-week expedition will fly out from Purdue University Airport in West Lafayette, Indiana on October 30 to Majuro in the Marshall Islands.
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A 15-person crew will depart Majuro by sea on November 4, sail approximately 1,200 nautical miles to Nikumaroro, and then spend several days on the small island.
Work on Nikumaroro will focus on inspecting the Taraia Object, which was only first noticed in satellite imagery in 2020 and looks like an aircraft fuselage and tail.
Promisingly, the Taraia Object was later confirmed to be visible on aerial photos taken of the island’s lagoon as far back as 1938, the year after the tragedy.
Initial work will include videos and still images of the site, followed by remote sensing with magnetometers and sonar.
Only after this will the team use underwater excavation using a hydraulic dredge to expose the object for identification, Purdue University said in a statement.
Amelia Earhart was an American aviation pioneer who was a widely known international celebrity during her lifetime – but the circumstances of her death remain a mystery. She’s pictured here in 1931 in the cockpit of her gyroplane
Earhart (born 1897) standing in front of the Lockheed Electra in which she disappeared in 1937
The theory for the crash site’s location is based on a satellite image showing an unusual object on the ocean floor just feet from the island’s shoreline
The small, remote and inhospitable island of Nikumaroro which has a large central marine lagoon is nearly 1,000 miles from Fiji
Additional fieldwork will include a walk-over survey of nearby land surfaces to search for debris washed up by waves.
The expedition is scheduled to return to port in Majuro around November 21 and fly home the following day – at which point the mystery could finally be put to bed.
The next momentous step would be returning what’s left of the Lockheed Electra 10E plane to the US.
Amelia Earhart’s original plan was to return the aircraft to West Lafayette after her historic flight to Howland Island.
‘Additional work would still be needed to accomplish that objective,’ said Steve Schultz, senior vice president and general counsel at Purdue University.
‘But we feel we owe it to her legacy, which remains so strong at Purdue, to try to find a way to bring it home.’
Earhart, already an aviation legend in the 1930s, came to Purdue in 1935 and worked for two years as a women’s career counselor and advisor in the university’s aeronautics department.
The recently opened Amelia Earhart Terminal at Purdue Airport honours her life and work, which was tragically cut short at the age of 39.
Amelia Earhart was on one of the final legs of the circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 when her plane tragically crashed
Although the aviator’s intended destination 88 years ago was Howland Island, Nikumaroro Island about 350 miles further southeast has emerged as an equally compelling location for the wreckage.
Experts recently detected code on an aluminium panel that was found washed up on Nikumaroro in 1991, thought to have been part of Earhart’s missing plane.
However, analysis found the panel did not belong to Earhart’s Lockheed Electra but instead was part of a plane that crashed during World War Two at least six years later.
However, another team of scientists recently said they’d pinpointed the location of her wreckage as near Howland Island[1] using a radio restored from 1937.
References
- ^ they’d pinpointed the location of her wreckage as near Howland Island (www.dailymail.co.uk)