NIKUMARORO, Kiribati — The shape in a remote Pacific lagoon that raised hopes of finally locating Amelia Earhart’s lost airplane turned out to be a heap of driftwood, the team that sailed out to examine it announced on Monday, local time.
The search, organized by Purdue University, the Purdue Research Foundation and the nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute, focused on an object dubbed the Taraia Object. It first showed up in satellite pictures taken in 2020 as a long, pale form resting in shallow water off the Taraia Peninsula, a sandy point on the uninhabited atoll.
Up close, the team concluded the object was most likely a group of large trees that had washed onto the sandspit. Much of that pile had already broken apart and drifted off before the crew got there, leaving one Y-shaped piece far smaller than what the satellite images showed.
The shine that had led some researchers to suspect aircraft metal also had a natural explanation. The surviving fragment, and other items the team picked up, carried a glossy crust of hardened coral sand, which the expedition said accounts for the glint.
The 17-member crew traveled for days by ship and lost time to rough weather, then spent four days working on shore with metal detectors and other gear. Large coconut crabs, which roam the island looking for food, helped push the team to bed down offshore each night.
The trip was not a total loss, according to the university. Divers and land crews recovered a range of artifacts, among them a steel tube roughly 30 inches long found in the lagoon near the peninsula. Researchers plan to keep studying those finds, which could support the idea that debris swept in through the atoll’s western channel tends to collect along the Taraia shoreline.
Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, after leaving Lae, Papua New Guinea, bound for Howland Island, which lies some 400 miles to the northwest of Nikumaroro, on one of the final legs of an attempt to fly around the world near the equator. The U.S. air and sea search that followed covered a stretch of ocean roughly the size of Texas.
Purdue has deep ties to the aviator. Earhart counseled and mentored women students there, and the Purdue Research Foundation paid for the Lockheed Electra 10-E she called her flying laboratory. Earlier trips to Nikumaroro have turned up hints of a castaway camp, part of a woman’s shoe from the 1930s and pieces of a cosmetics jar, and the university says it will keep searching.
