New Zealand museum releases 47 aerial photos of Earhart island Nikumaroro

The Air Force Museum of New Zealand has released 47 digitised, high-resolution black-and-white photographs from a 1938 aerial survey of Nikumaroro, the remote Pacific atoll where Amelia Earhart is believed to have crash-landed, as a US expedition searches the island for new evidence.

The Christchurch museum said it had received several requests for the images and published the full set on its website. Some low-resolution copies had previously been posted on blogs. The negatives were found more than a decade ago by Matthew O'Sullivan, the museum's keeper of photographs.

Ric Gillespie, the most prominent investigator of Earhart's disappearance, described the images on his blog as a "goldmine". He said they were a complete set of aerial photographs taken on 1 December 1938 by an amphibious biplane during a New Zealand survey of Pacific islands that was looking for suitable airbase locations.

The museum said the images are among the earliest photographic evidence of the island. There is no immediate sign of an object in the Taraia area.

The mystery

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on 2 July 1937 during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe at the equator. The search has been stop-and-start over eight decades and filled with false leads.

One leading theory holds that Earhart, who set several records including becoming the first woman to fly a nonstop solo trip across the Atlantic, ran out of fuel and was marooned on Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island. The hypothesis is that she survived for a while, drinking rainwater and eating fish and turtles, based on signs of a castaway's campsite and artefacts including glass from a jar thought to have contained cosmetic cream.

Latest expedition

This week, archaeologists and scientists from Earhart's former benefactor, Purdue University in Indianapolis, are searching part of the island for the "Taraia Object" – an elongated shape in a lagoon named after the part of the island where it was first noticed in a 2020 satellite image.

Other longtime explorers, including Gillespie, are not convinced, saying it is probably a fallen tree rather than the wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. The small atoll, part of the archipelago country of Kiribati, has been visited dozens of times.

In its latest update, the expedition said "severe weather" had hampered its metal-detecting but that it would release an update within 48 hours. Purdue said it remained on schedule, with two more days of field operations planned and an update on the identification of the Taraia Object expected.

Rick Pettigrew, the expedition lead and executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, said the work was a complex scientific process. "You don't simply arrive at a site and immediately identify what's there. We have to carefully collect the data, analyse it and reach sound conclusions," he said, thanking the public for its patience.

Source: The Guardian.