A recent mission to a remote island in the South Pacific in search of debris from Amelia Earhart’s missing aircraft has ended without a definitive discovery.

On Monday, researchers said they found “no conclusive evidence” that the celebrated pilot brought her Lockheed 10E Electra down on or near the tiny atoll located south of the planned stop on her doomed journey nearly 90 years ago.

The expedition to Nikumaroro Island was organized by the Archaeological Legacy Institute, based in Eugene, Oregon, and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The 17-member group of researchers and technical specialists reached the island on October 12.

The continuing effort to explain Amelia Earhart’s disappearance

The mission centered on investigating a blurry feature called the Taraia Object, spotted in a lagoon through satellite images in 2020. Expedition leader and archaeologist Rick Pettigrew believed the plane-like shape might have been wreckage from Earhart’s aircraft.

But the team “found no conclusive evidence” supporting the idea that pieces of Earhart’s plane were resting in a lagoon on the isolated South Pacific atoll, Purdue University said in a statement.

Material collected on Nikumaroro indicated that the unusual form in the satellite image was probably a group of large trees that had washed up along the peninsula’s sandbar. By the time the researchers reached the location, much of the debris had broken apart and been carried away by the water.

“The evidence for the castaway hypothesis, which brought us here, remained very, very strong,” said Pettigrew, executive director of ALI, in a video statement. “We think that it’s very likely that Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did in fact end up here on Nikumaroro Island.”

Steve Schultz, Purdue’s general counsel and a field assistant on the trip, said the result allowed the group to dismiss this particular theory about the object, but did not weaken what he described as the broader and persuasive case that Earhart and Noonan became stranded there.

The mystery of Amelia Earhart

Earhart and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937, while attempting to make Earhart the first woman to fly around the world. They were last observed departing Lae, New Guinea, for an exhausting 18-hour flight toward Howland Island, a small and isolated point in the Pacific.

Her disappearance remains one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries. For generations, historians, aviation experts, and amateur investigators have debated what happened during the final stage of her flight.

The latest search followed a theory that Earhart may not have died in an ocean crash. It was prompted by an object resembling an airplane in satellite imagery, although it ultimately may have been nothing more than submerged vegetation. Pettigrew said the expedition would be worthwhile regardless of what investigators found.

The leading explanation — and the official conclusion reached after a major US government search shortly after the disappearance — is that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and their Electra went down in the Pacific near Howland Island.

Other researchers, including organizers of the recent mission, believe the pair may have landed roughly 400 miles, or 644 kilometers, south of Howland on or near Nikumaroro Island. Under that scenario, they survived as castaways for a time before likely dying from exposure, dehydration, or starvation.

A focus on Nikumaroro Island

Numerous searches for Earhart’s plane, including previous expeditions around Nikumaroro, have failed to produce confirmed new evidence.

“Nikumaroro Island has been searched more than 15 times, to no avail,” said Dorothy Cochrane, an Earhart specialist and retired curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. She said the latest team was among many groups that had not uncovered verified evidence connected to the Electra, Earhart, or Noonan on the island.

In 2024, ocean exploration firm Deep Sea Vision identified a plane-shaped feature in sonar data about 100 miles, or 160 kilometers, from Howland Island. Later examination determined that the object was a rock formation. A 2019 Nikumaroro expedition led by oceanographer Bob Ballard, known for locating the Titanic in 1985, also did not find decisive answers.

During the new expedition, American researchers examined Nikumaroro’s lagoon with a magnetometer, an instrument that detects iron, and used sonar equipment to look for objects buried beneath sediment on the lagoon floor.

“We accomplished our main goal, which was to come here and test that hypothesis,” Pettigrew said in the video statement.

Nikumaroro, now part of the Republic of Kiribati, is an uninhabited island surrounded by coral reefs in the South Pacific. It is home to large coconut crabs and is so distant from major population centers that the team needed five days to travel there by sea from Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati.

The Purdue Research Foundation originally helped finance Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. Purdue said Earhart had planned to return the aircraft to the university after finishing her historic around-the-world flight.

Earhart had come close to completing that goal when she disappeared. She had already covered about 22,000 miles, or 35,405 kilometers, and had approximately 7,000 miles, or 11,265 kilometers, remaining.

Purdue’s search is unlikely to be the final attempt to locate Earhart’s plane.

Deep-sea exploration company Nauticos is seeking between $8 million and $10 million for an expedition it hopes could provide a final answer in the waters around Howland Island. Its proposed search area has been narrowed using new information from tests involving a replica of Earhart’s radio system. The company has conducted three searches near the island since 2002.