Nearly ninety years after Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific, a fresh attempt to solve the mystery is underway on one of the remotest islands on Earth. A 17-person team of marine archaeologists, backed by Purdue University, set sail from Los Angeles in early October and is expected to reach Nikumaroro — an uninhabited coral atoll in Kiribati's Phoenix Islands — on 13 October.
The mission, led by Richard Pettigrew of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Oregon, is chasing a tantalising clue: a plane-shaped object spotted in satellite imagery of the island's lagoon in 2020. The team believes the shape, which they argue also appears in aerial photos dating back to 1938, could be the fuselage of Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E. The $900,000 expedition will spend five days on the atoll before a six-day boat journey back to Tarawa, Kiribati's capital.
If wreckage is confirmed, it would bolster the castaway theory: that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan crash-landed on Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island, and died there as castaways. The alternative — and the official U.S. position — holds that the plane simply ran out of fuel and sank near Howland Island, its intended refuelling stop about 400 miles away.
Not everyone is convinced. Ric Gillespie, who has led a dozen expeditions to the atoll over three decades with his group TIGHAR, argues the lagoon object is just a fallen pandanus tree. He believes the plane was eventually swept off the coral flat and lost to the sea. Even Titanic-finder Robert Ballard came up empty in 2019; a promising sonar image elsewhere on the seafloor turned out to be rocks. Still, Gillespie's own decades of work underpin the current effort: investigators have found a 1930s freckle cream jar, remnants of a jackknife like one Earhart carried, forensic analysis of 1940s skeletal remains, and a shoreline photo showing what looks like landing gear.
Purdue has a personal stake in the story. Earhart spent two years there as a career counsellor and aeronautics adviser, and a Purdue research grant funded the 'flying laboratory' itself. If anything is recovered, the university would need further permission from Kiribati to remove it — nothing will be taken from the site on this trip.
For travellers, the story puts a spotlight on one of the planet's least-visited corners. The Phoenix Islands Protected Area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a vast marine reserve reachable only by long boat journeys, and Nikumaroro itself is uninhabited. You're not going to catch this expedition, but Earhart's trail runs through the wider region — from Lae in Papua New Guinea, her last departure point, to the atolls of Kiribati — making it a fascinating thread for anyone drawn to the far Pacific.
