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Cosmic Science

Oops! That’s not Amelia Earhart’s plane — it’s a rock

Airplane-shaped rock formation
A sonar image shows a rock formation previously thought to be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. (Credit: Deep Sea Vision)

Once again, a seemingly promising lead in the search for traces of missing aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her plane has fizzled out.

Hopes of solving the 87-year-old mystery were raised in January when Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by former Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, said they captured a fuzzy sonar image that looked like an airplane.

Deep Sea Vision said the find was notable because the shape was detected about 100 miles from Howland Island, in an area of the Pacific Ocean where the team suspected Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have gone down during their attempt to fly around the globe in 1937.

“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one; and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show when the discovery was announced.

Unfortunately for Romeo and his team, higher-resolution sonar imagery revealed that the shape was merely a natural rock formation lying more than 16,000 feet beneath the ocean surface. The new sonar view was captured this month by an autonomous underwater vehicle.

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Cosmic Science

Image revives hopes of solving Amelia Earhart mystery

Comparison of sonar image and aircraft diagram
A sonar image shows a shape similar to that of Amelia Earhart's lost airplane. (Credit: Deep Sea Vision)

Update: The object that Deep Sea Vision thought was wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s plane turns out to be a rock formation.

What happened to Amelia Earhart, the famed aviator whose plane disappeared in 1937 as she was trying to fly around the world? After surveying 5,200 square miles of the Pacific Ocean, searchers say they may have picked up the sonar signature of Earhart’s sunken aircraft.

If their hypothesis holds up, the find could well solve one of the aviation world’s greatest mysteries. But if it doesn’t hold up, it wouldn’t be the first dead end in the 87-year-long search.

The 90-day sonar survey was conducted last year by Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer who reportedly sold his  real estate investments to fund the $11 million expedition.

In a news release issued today, Deep Sea Vision said it made use of a customized underwater robot to search wide swaths of the ocean floor with side-scan sonar. As the survey was winding up, the team identified a blurry shape that appeared to match the dimensions of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.

“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one; and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show.

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GeekWire

Does bone study crack the Amelia Earhart case?

Amelia Earhart
Famed aviator Amelia Earhart looks out from the cockpit of her plane in a circa-1936 picture. (Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress via University of Tennessee)

A newly published study lends support to the view that famed aviator Amelia Earhart died on the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro during her attempt to fly around the world in 1937.

In the study, published by Forensic Anthropology, Richard Jantz contends that the recorded measurements for remains found on the island in 1940 are consistent with the estimated size of Earhart’s bones. That contradicts earlier determinations by experts that the bones belonged to a stocky middle-aged man.

Jantz estimated Earhart’s skeletal dimensions by analyzing photographs of the aviator and factoring in clothing measurements from a collection of Earhart’s personal papers.

Some anthropologists have questioned how reliable such methods could be, but Jantz insists that the bones described in 1940 should have more similarity to Earhart’s bones than to 99 percent of the individuals in his reference sample of 2,700 individuals.

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