A U.S. expedition traveled to a remote Pacific island hoping to solve the mystery of what happened to legendary aviator Amelia Earhart. The answer wasn't quite the one they were looking for.
Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished in 1937 during their attempt to circumnavigate the globe at the equator.
The atoll of Nikumaroro in the archipelago nation of Kiribati had long been thought of as a location where they might have crash-landed.
Kiribati is about halfway between Australia and Hawaiʻi.
The Guardian reports the latest mission stemmed from 2020 satellite images showing a long, white object lying in shallow water near a sandy peninsula.
After a multiday voyage by ship and several delays due to bad weather, the 17-person expedition passed through the atoll.
They set up tents to conduct four days of research. The crew was forced to sleep offshore, partly due to giant land-dwelling coconut crabs.
Purdue University in Indiana confirmed in a statement that the “visual anomaly” was not wreckage of an airplane, but “likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula's sandspit.”
The trip was partially sponsored by the university, where Earhart once taught young female pilots.
The university statement said the expedition added a new chapter in “the quest to find the ultimate answer to the mystery of what happened to Earhart during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe nearly nine decades ago.”
