Ground truthing strikes again. 2020 satellite imagery of a Kiribati atoll that kinda sorta looked like a downed aircraft—sparking speculation that it might be the crash site of Amelia Earhart’s plane—turned out to be just a clump of trees once what sounds like a fairly serious expedition (because: Amelia Earhart) got to the site. Purdue University:
Evidence gathered at the Taraia Peninsula on Nikumaroro confirmed that the visual anomaly first seen in satellite imagery in 2020 was likely a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandspit. By the time the team arrived at the site, a good portion of the debris had fragmented and washed away, leaving only a single Y-shaped segment—a fraction of the anomaly’s original size observed in imagery when the Taraia Object hypothesis was developed.
See also coverage from the Guardian and Smithsonian magazine. As J. Steven York opined on Mastodon, “And this, my friends, is why, thought they’re fun and often useful, you don’t trust things like Apple or Google maps for serious research, especially with real-world costs or consequences. They may have been compressed, stitched, degraded, distorted, or even consciously altered in ways you can’t anticipate or detect.”
