A team of researchers have arrived at a remote island to inspect possible plane wreckage of famed aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished in 1937 while flying around the world.
The group from the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and Purdue University arrived at Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean on Monday.
The search team’s work, expected to take five days, could be hampered by giant land-dwelling crabs, as well as the El Niño climate phenomenon which is now the strongest ever recorded.
Coconut crabs, also known as Robber crabs, emerge at night to hunt for small mammals and seabirds, and will force the search crew to spend nights on their ship for their own safety.
The disappearance of Earhart, an American aviation pioneer who was attempting to circumnavigate the globe with navigator Fred Noonan, has spawned decades of speculation.
Researchers will work to locate what has been called the Taraia Object, first spotted sitting on the edge of a lagoon off Nikumaroro in satellite imagery in 2020.
Some believe it to be the wreckage of her plane, but others have expressed scepticism that it is an aircraft at all, with one theory suggesting it is a collapsed tree.
This is the first authorised trip to Nikumaroro Island in seven years, and the first visit to the Taraia Peninsula in more than 15, according to Purdue.
The ship, the Marin Mainiku, on Monday arrived at the western side of the island, part of the nation of Kiribati, after a five-day voyage crossing 830-nautical-miles through the South Pacific.
“It is incredibly rewarding to be this close to completing our inspection of the Taraia Object and potentially solving, at long last, the outstanding mystery of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan more than 89 years ago,” expedition leader Rick Pettigrew said in a blog post on Monday.
Coconut crabs, pictured here in the Marshall Islands, could have played a role in Earhart’s disappearance [Getty Images]
On Tuesday, the crew plans to navigate through a narrow gap “blasted” in the atoll’s reef by the British in 1963 – the last time the island was inhabited – to prepare for landing.
The first day on the island will focus on “transporting equipment, clearing vegetation, and establishing staging operations”, according to the post. One group of researchers will cut a trail through the jungle.
Work will then shift to searching for evidence, including magnetic metals, on the Taraia Peninsula on Wednesday.
Lastly, the researchers will use dredging equipment to move sediment for a visual inspection of the mystery object, which is believed to be located only 10 feet from the shore in as little as five feet of water (depending on the tides).
A satellite image of the so-called Taraia Object in a lagoon on Nikumaroro [Archaeological Legacy Institute]
Weather and ocean conditions “will continue to be a factor”, researchers say, and El Niño could limit daily access to shore. Michael Krivor, a marine archaeologist on the trip, said he is currently concerned about a weather pattern traveling from east to west that could interfere with “safe transit in and out of the blasted channels”.
Another concern is the crabs, the largest land-dwelling invertebrates on the planet.
“The crew will sleep nightly aboard the Marin Mainiku for a number of reasons, one of which is the presence of coconut crabs, whose size and overnight activity make staying on the island impractical,” the blog post says.
Several theories suggest Earhart survived a crash on the island before being overcome by giant meat-eating crabs that carried away her bones.
The crabs, which occupy atolls and desert islands throughout the South Pacific, can lift up to 28kg (62lbs), and are one of the only species that can crack open a coconut, although they also hunt for live prey like rats and birds.
With a leg span of up to one metre and a body weight of more than 4kg, they are also the world’s largest land-dwelling crustacean and are able to climb trees.
In 2018, the International Group of Historical Aircraft Recovery used pig carcasses to demonstrate how the crabs were able to drag bodies to their burrows and strip the bones of flesh in less than two weeks.
Earhart had already successfully flown from California across South America, Africa and Asia in her Electra twin-engine plane when she arrived in Lae, Papua New Guinea, on 2 July 1937.
From there, she and Noonan planned to travel towards Hawaii, but the plane vanished without a trace as they tried to reach uninhabited Howland Island, near Nikumaroro, to refuel.
While there have been numerous theories about the disappearance, the official explanation is that the plane suffered communication problems and, as she and Noonan struggled to find the island, the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.
