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The latest search for Amelia Earhart’s plane has resurfaced a theory about what may have caused the legendary explorer’s demise – giant, meat-eating crabs.
A team from Indiana’s Purdue University arrived at the remote Nikumaroro Island in the South Pacific Monday to begin their work but will be spending nights away from the site on their boat because the island is overrun by three-foot-wide, 9-lb coconut crabs.
Earhart, the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic, went missing with navigator Fred Noonan on July 2, 1937, after her Lockheed 10E Electra twin-engine plane ran low on fuel and vanished over the Pacific during at an attempt to fly around the world.
Her disappearance has sparked decades of search missions, research and conspiracy theories.
One of the more credible theories has been that Earhart crashed or landed on the island, in the Republic of Kiribati, and the wounded pilot was eaten by the crabs.
British colonists found a woman’s shoe, airplane parts and a box that contained a navigational tool called a sextant in the late 1930s, and later explorations turned up eaten animal bones and evidence of campfires, according to NASA.
The crustaceans, which have an excellent sense of smell, eat small mammals and seabirds using their sharp claws to rip through tough exteriors.
Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, were flying to nearby Howland Island, about 400 miles north of Nikumarono, when their aircraft disappeared.
The Purdue research team is investigating a peculiar object that can be seen in satellite imagery and could be the plane. The investigators are currently working to transport equipment, clear jungle vegetation and set up operations at Nikumaroro’s central lagoon. They’ll start their investigation at the island’s southwestern Taraia Peninsula.
They will survey the peninsula’s edge to see if there are any artifacts at the surface and take a boat to lay out transect lines in surrounding water. Transect lines are measuring tape that helps scientists set up a search area and mark where they’ve looked.
To detect any metal in the area, they’ll use an underwater metal detector known as a magnetometer.
The team will also deploy sonar technology to detect the object under the seafloor. Sonar tech emits pulses of sound into the water. If there’s something in the sound wave’s way, it will bounce off the object and return a reading.
Lastly, the team will use two tools called a hydroprobe and induction dredge, which will help determine the object’s depth and direction and remove sediment for visual inspection.
The object is believed to be only 10 feet from the shore of the lagoon and around five feet below the surface. Photos of the object have been captured dating back to the year the plane went missing.
Other explorers who have looked for Earhart’s plane in the lagoon say that that what has been seen on satellite images is a red herring.
“We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” Ric Gillespie, the executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, who searched there in 2001 and 2007, told NBC News last year.
It has been seven years since the last authorized expedition at Nikumaroro and more than 15 years since anyone has been on the Taraia Peninsula.
“It is incredibly rewarding to be this close to completing our inspection of the Taraia Object and potentially solving, at long last, the outstanding mystery of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan more than 89 years ago,” expedition leader Rick Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, said in a Monday statement.