NEW YORK: Undeterred by skeptics and hoping modern technology can help solve a 70-year-old mystery, a group of investigators embarks this week on a new attempt to discover whether famed aviator Amelia Earhart may have crash-landed and died as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island.

The expedition by 15 members of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, known as TIGHAR, will be the group’s ninth visit to the atoll known as Nikumaroro, located about 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Hawaii.

They were to fly from Los Angeles to Fiji on Thursday and board a chartered motor sailer for a 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer), five-day trip to the uninhabited, 2 1/2-mile (4-kilometer) -long island near the intersection of the equator and the international dateline.

Once there, the group was to spend 17 days searching for human bones, aircraft parts and any other evidence to show that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, reached the island on July 2, 1937, crashed on a reef at low tide and made it to shore, where they possibly lived for months as castaways, written off by the world as having been lost at sea.

The conditions during the search will be punishing, with the explorers forced to contend with dense jungle vegetation, 100-degree (40 Celsius) heat, sharks that reside in a lagoon in the middle of the island and voracious crabs that make it necessary to wear shoes at all times.

More at the International Herald Tribune