Suspected Amelia Earhart plane wreckage identified as clump of trees

A team of explorers and archaeologists failed to locate Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft during a US$900,000 expedition to the remote island of Nikumaroro in Kiribati. The mission was launched to investigate an elongated, multi-pronged object detected in 2020 satellite imagery within the island's lagoon, which some scholars believed could be wreckage from the plane.

According to the New Straits Times, mission leaders announced on Monday that the object was determined to be a cluster of washed-up trees rather than plane wreckage.

The expedition was backed by private donors and Purdue University and included filmmakers and researchers. While the search did not find the "smoking gun" required to confirm the hypothesis that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan died as castaways on the atoll, team member and Purdue general counsel Steve Schultz stated in a video message that the adventure was still worthwhile. The whereabouts of the plane remain a mystery.

Brief written by urgent.news from ABC News AU, New Straits Times, CBS News, The Hill — 4 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.