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Gabriel Scarlett

After years of exploring the ocean on various research vessels, Ballard acquired his own, the E/V Nautilus, and staffed it with a crew of deep-sea discovery experts—the Corps of Exploration. In the ship’s control room, Ballard examines images beamed from two underwater vehicles for signs of Amelia Earhart’s airplane.

A painting of the plane that Amelia Earhart called the ’little red bus’—the Lockheed Vega 5B that carried her across the Atlantic—is displayed at the aviator's birthplace museum in Atchison, Kansas.

Fireworks explode during the Amelia Earhart Festival in Atchison, Kansas, while spectators watch from the lawn in front of Earhart's childhood home.

A reseacher tags a tree on Nikumaroro Island while a resident coconut crab perches nearby.

Coconut crabs are the largest land invertebrates on the planet. Now they may hold the key to one of exploration's biggest mysteries.

Tom King, former chief archaeologist for TIGHAR, checks soil recovered from a site on Nikumaroro where Earhardt may have sheltered.