Purdue-backed team to search Nikumaroro lagoon for Earhart aircraft remains

A Purdue University-backed team will travel to Nikumaroro Island in October 2026 to determine whether a feature in the atoll's lagoon is wreckage from the plane flown by Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan. The two went missing over the South Pacific on July 2, 1937.

The site, known as the Taraia Object, lies in shallow water near the end of a sandy peninsula. Researcher Michael Ashmore found it in Apple Maps satellite imagery in 2020. That discovery prompted a review of other satellite images, aerial photographs and video.

The Archaeological Legacy Institute is leading the trip, with Purdue University and the Purdue Research Foundation as partners. The institute says the object's apparent size, shape and reflective properties match components of the Electra, and that earlier imagery shows the same feature.

The Purdue Research Foundation helped pay for Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E in the 1930s. Nikumaroro has no inhabitants and sits about 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, where Earhart and Noonan intended to land after leaving Lae, New Guinea.

The theory that the pair reached Nikumaroro after failing to find Howland, came down on its reef and lived there for a period has centered on the island for years. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, known as TIGHAR, has worked on that theory for decades but rejects the aircraft explanation for this site. In a 2021 account, the group described the feature as a fallen palm tree and its root mass.

Nothing recovered at the island so far has been conclusively tied to Earhart's plane.