By GB News (World News) | Created at 2026-10-19 03:00:39 | Updated at 2026-10-19 04:29:57
1 hour ago
The hunt for Amelia Earhart's lost aircraft has resumed on a remote Pacific atoll after bad weather halted operations for three days.
A team of researchers on Nikumaroro Island, part of the Republic of Kiribati, is examining a submerged feature known as the Taraia Object, first identified in aerial photographs of the atoll's lagoon.
Sirisha Bandla, a technology specialist on the expedition, in a video recorded aboard the research vessel Marin Mainiku, said: "We are finally getting off the ship and able to land on Nikumaroro."
Rough seas and powerful winds driven by strong El Niño conditions had kept the crew on board since arriving at the uninhabited island last week.
Mrs Earhart, then 39, vanished on July 2 1937, during an ambitious attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.
She had already crossed South America, Africa and Asia in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra before departing from Lae, Papua New Guinea, bound for a refuelling stop on Howland Island, roughly 4,000 kilometres to the east.
Radio contact was lost the following day after she reported that fuel was running low. Her final known transmission gave a geographical line of position.
The disappearance triggered the largest search for a missing aircraft the US government had ever mounted, including an aerial survey of what was then called Gardner Island, now Nikumaroro, yet nothing was found.
One longstanding theory holds that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, inadvertently reached Nikumaroro, ditched the plane and perished as castaways.
The $900,000 expedition, spearheaded by Purdue University and the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), comprises 17 members who departed from Los Angeles earlier this month.
"Finding Amelia Earhart's Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime," said ALI director Richard Pettigrew.
The team began an initial underwater survey before the storms hit but could not start the second of three planned phases, which involves probing submerged objects to establish their depth and dredging sediment from the lagoon floor.
The Taraia Object, a multi-branched shape that the team believes resembles an aircraft fuselage and wings, was first noticed in a 2020 satellite image.
Purdue says it has since been identified in earlier aerial photography stretching back to 1938.
Not everyone is convinced the Taraia Object will prove to be wreckage.
Ric Gillespie, co-founder of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, has conducted a dozen expeditions to Nikumaroro over three decades and is himself the foremost advocate of the castaway theory, yet he is certain the submerged shape is merely a fallen pandanus tree.
Mr Gillespie said: "You can see the root ball. You can see the branches...It's a tree. People see what they want to see."
A 2019 expedition led by Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, found nothing near the atoll. In 2024, a sonar image resembling an aircraft on the ocean floor near Howland Island turned out to be a rock formation.
The wreck of the SS Norwich City, a British merchant vessel that ran aground on Nikumaroro during a storm in 1929, killing 11 crew members, may offer an intriguing link to the case.
Shortly after Earhart vanished, a 15-year-old in Florida reported hearing her voice repeating "New York City" over a shortwave radio.
Supporters of the castaway theory suggest this could have been a garbled reference to the Norwich City.
Steve Schultz, Purdue's general counsel and an expedition member, said no artefacts would be removed on this trip; extracting any wreckage would require Kiribati government approval.
Mr Pettigrew said the team recognised worldwide interest and would publish findings "as soon as we are able."
