Amelia Earhart plane search resumes after Pacific storms

An expedition searching for Amelia Earhart’s missing aircraft resumed access to Nikumaroro island in Kiribati on Sunday, 18 October, after strong winds and rough seas stranded researchers aboard their vessel for three days, BBC News reported. The team is investigating an unidentified object in the atoll’s lagoon, not a confirmed aircraft wreck.

Purdue University and the US-based Archaeological Legacy Institute are leading the expedition to examine the so-called Taraia Object, which has been spotted in aerial imagery. Researchers extended their fieldwork schedule following the weather delay but had not announced any promising evidence of Earhart’s plane.

Technology specialist Sirisha Bandla said in a video update from the research vessel Marin Mainiku that the team could finally go ashore. She said researchers hoped to complete as much work as possible that day.

Weather holds up underwater investigation

The team reached the uninhabited atoll the previous week and began an underwater survey of its target area. Bad weather then prevented it from starting the second stage of a three-phase investigation: probing submerged objects to establish their depth and dredging sediment.

Access to the lagoon requires a boat to pass through a narrow opening in the reef, cut by the British in 1963, when the island was last inhabited. Purdue said gusts reaching 27 knots, or about 31mph, had made the passage hazardous, with waves threatening to push the transport boat onto the reef.

Archaeological Legacy Institute director Rick Pettigrew said the researchers understood the worldwide interest and would release results when they could. Before the weather interruption, Purdue had suggested that identifying the object might take only days; that expectation was not a finding.

An object whose identity remains disputed

Purdue says the Taraia Object appears in photographs dating to 1938. Images have been interpreted as possibly showing parts of a small aircraft in shallow water, but other explorers dispute that reading. One alternative explanation is a tree that fell into the lagoon.

On Friday, New Zealand’s Air Force Museum released previously unseen aerial reconnaissance photographs of Nikumaroro taken from a seaplane in 1938. The object is not clearly apparent in those black-and-white images. They do, however, show the wreck of the British merchant ship SS Norwich City, which ran aground during a storm in 1929, killing 11 people.

Purdue cited the shipwreck both as an illustration of the island’s dangers and as a possible clue supporting the castaway theory. According to the university, a 15-year-old in Florida reported hearing a voice she identified as Earhart’s repeating “New York City” on her father’s shortwave radio shortly after the disappearance. Supporters of the theory suggest she may instead have heard a reference to Norwich City. That interpretation does not establish that Earhart reached the island.

Decades of searches, but no confirmed wreck

Earhart disappeared in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra. After travelling through South America, Africa and Asia, she reached Lae in Papua New Guinea on 2 July. She and navigator Fred Noonan vanished on the subsequent leg towards Howland Island, where they intended to refuel before continuing towards Hawaii and California.

The Nikumaroro hypothesis proposes that Earhart reached the atoll unintentionally, ditched her aircraft and died there as a castaway. Earlier researchers have found signs of human presence on the island around the period of her disappearance, but those findings have not settled her fate.

Previous searches underline the difficulty of interpreting suggestive images. In 2024, researchers identified a sonar target roughly 4,877 metres below the sea near Howland Island as a possible aircraft; it later proved to be a rock formation. A 2019 expedition investigating a photograph thought possibly to show landing gear near Nikumaroro also failed to locate the plane.