Amelia Earhart in 1931, after breaking the record for the highest altitude reached by a woman flying an autogiro, an aircraft from the early twentieth century. (Bettmann / Corbis) 

The U.S.-based International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) think they’ve found the debris of Amelia Earhart’s plane – believed to have been lost for 75 years – about 180 metres below the ocean surface.  

In 1937, Earhart set out on a mission to become the first woman to fly around the entire globe. Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937, on her flight from New Guinea to Howland Island. What went down has been a mystery ever since – though new promising leads suggest an answer to the famous mystery.

It appears Earhart made an emergency landing on a reef in the ocean, and took refuge on a small island (Nikumaroro) in the republic of Kiribati where she and Noonan would have lived as castaways in their final days. The theory has not been confirmed, though it looks to be pretty convincing. See more details in the CBC’s video below.

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Jeremy Schipper is an intern at Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @jeromeoschipps.