The mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, will continue, as the team that traveled to a remote Pacific island did not find what they were looking for.
The Taraia Object expedition, a partnership by the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), Purdue Research Foundation and Purdue University, said the item that they believed could have been Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E was not the plane.
The item off the coast of Nikumaroro was likely a collection of large trees first seen on satellite images in 2020. Only part of the debris remains.
But the team left with discoveries.
They found several artifacts, including a nearly 30-inch-long steel tube near a lagoon on the Taraia Peninsula, the team said in a news release.
Amelia Earhart’s milestones
Despite her final flight ending in mystery, Earhart broke several records as she pursued her love of flying.
They include, according to the Smithsonian Institution Air and Space Museum:
Earhart was the first woman to fly at 14,000 feet in 1922.
She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean as a passenger in 1928.
In 1929, she set the women’s speed record and then broke it again in 1930.
She was the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone in 1932. She was the second person ever to make the solo, nonstop crossing. Charles Lindbergh was the first.
She was also the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across the U.S. that same year.
In 1935, she was the first person to fly nonstop and solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. She also set the speed record between Mexico City and Washington, D.C. She was also the first person to fly solo from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey.
When she disappeared in 1937, she was trying to become the first woman to fly around the world at the Equator. She was on her third-to-last leg of the journey after leaving Papua New Guinea when she and Noonan disappeared. They were flying to Howland Island, about 400 miles away from Nikumaroro, The New York Times reported.