While the young Amelia Earhart is living up to her namesake and attempting to circumnavigate the world, a new revelation may have finally pinpointed where the original Amelia Earhart may have crashed.

Forensic investigators are analysing a picture from 1937, which shows Earhart waving alongside her plane, to try and match up a recovered piece of sheet metal and it’s rivet pattern (found on Gardner Island, now Nikumaroroto) to the image of the sheets on the plane’s body.

That a match of the rivet patterns would provide “conclusive proof” that the aviator was not, as was widely believed, lost at sea, but instead landed on Gardner Island, now Nikumaroro in the archipelago of Kiribati, 2,000 miles west of Mexico.

That forensic breakthrough would in turn indicate that the aviator may have died of starvation, illness or thirst, instead of being killed when her plane crashed into the ocean .

Earhart disappeared in early July 1937 after a radio antenna broke off from her plane as she took off from Papua New Guinea, en route to Howland Island south of Hawaii.

Check out the full story on the National Post.