Earhart may have survived for a time on tiny Nikumaroro Island
The mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance has enthralled people for almost 75 years. As glamorous as she was pioneering and innovative, Earhart's legacy ended too soon when she and her navigator disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937. But a series of tantalizing clues indicates that either she or her navigator (or both) may have survived for a time, stranded and desperate on the tiny island now known as Nikumaroro.
Nikumaroro (formerly called Gardner Island) is part of the Phoenix Islands in the western Pacific. It is a small, comma-shaped ring of land with a large central marine lagoon taking up most of the middle of the island. The lagoon is connected to the Pacific via a bridge that floods at high tide, and is dry during low tide. The island features only a tiny strip of beach a few feet wide, and is surrounded by a rugged coral field which drops off sharply to the surrounding deep ocean floor.
Earhart disappeared in July of 1937. In December of 1938, a small group of British settlers were dropped off on the island as part of a misguided settlement plan (which quickly failed). In addition to some scattered skeletal remains, they found the broken remains of bottles which once held freckle cream (Earhart was known to be self-conscious about her freckles) and a hand cream that was popular with women in 1937. The bottles had been broken and used for survival: some had melted bottoms, from standing in a fire to boil water. Other shards had been used as cutting tools.
The bones were sent away for analysis and promptly lost.
A new analysis of transmissions recorded after Earhart's disappearance finds it credible that they were transmissions from Earhart herself. The battery for her radio was located at the bottom of her plane, where it would have been subject to shorting out from sea water if the plane had landed in the water (as it must surely have done, to some extent). The transmissions give a compass heading that passes directly through Nikumaroro.
Later transmissions were received for up to a week after Earhart's disappearance; while they were dismissed at the time, researchers now believe that they point to a scenario where Earhart's plane was stranded on a tidal coral flat. This would have made the plane accessible during low tide, but only for a few days until the plane's batteries were destroyed by the seawater.
TIGHAR, the private organization which has been researching Earhart's disappearance, has planned a high-tech search of the ocean floor for Earhart's plane to start this July.