An expedition searched for Amelia Earhart’s lost plane: Here’s what they actually found instead

A team of researchers descended on the Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro earlier this month to investigate the Taraia Object lying underwater in the island’s lagoon. The object was first spotted in satellite imagery in 2020 and due to its highly reflective nature was thought by some to possibly be the remains of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E.

The famous aviator and her navigator Fred Noonan went missing after leaving Lea, Papua New Guinea on July 2, 1937, when they failed to reach Howland Island to refuel before continuing on to Hawaii. The mystery of the fate of the twin-engine plane and its crew has sparked numerous theories of what befell them.

One of those held that one or both of them managed to make it to the atoll after their plane ran out of fuel and crashed. While a search carried out failed to find any signs of Earhart, Noonan, or the aircraft, in 1940 the discovery of the remains of 13 human bones on Nikumaroro lead to some believing that they may have reached the island only to meet a gruesome fate at the hands of one of the island’s inhabitants, giant coconut crabs.

After spending seven days conducting research onshore and underwater, the 17-person team from Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and Purdue University were able to confirm that the Taraia Object was “likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandspit,” they said in a statement.

“The fragment’s reflective surface, long associated with the idea that the object was a metallic substance, was due to its carbonate veneer,” the researchers explained. “Other items found by the team were similarly coated with a shiny concretized amalgam of coral sand.”

Despite failing to find a “smoking gun” connecting Nikumaroro to the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan, the team was still “in great spirits and proud of what was accomplished,” said ALI’s executive director Rick Pettigrew. “We accomplished our goal to determine what the Taraia Object was, and we’re deeply grateful to the private donors who shared our vision and made this journey possible.”

“We set out to test a hypothesis, not to guarantee a particular result, and we followed the evidence to the end,” Purdue general counsel and expedition member Steve Schultz noted. “While the Taraia Object did not prove to be what we hoped, the journey produced new discoveries, added to the world’s knowledge of Nikumaroro, and wrote another extraordinary chapter in a story of discovery and exploration.”

“Perhaps no words better capture this expedition than Amelia Earhart’s own: ‘Adventure is worthwhile in itself,’” he said.

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