Castaway theory

I was alerted to this snippet via ALIA Weekly, the online newsletter that my annual membership helps pay for. The headline read - 'Photos found by NZ archivist could solve Earhart mystery' (the key word here was obviously archivist). 
As the world knows it, Amelia Earhart was attempting to circumnavigate the planet in 1937, when she went missing on the 4,000km leg from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island in the Pacific. Radio contact with the plane was lost after she reported running low on fuel, and the massive sea-and-air search that followed proved unsuccessful. 
Heaps of theories have been advanced as to what truly transpired. The best one was that she was secretly an agent for the CIA, on a mission to overfly Saipan to check out Japanese military expansion into the Pacific area - and that they shot down her twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane, captured her and wounded navigator Fred Noonan, and that she died years later in a Japanese prison on the island.

The area under investigation

Satellite image of Nukimaroro Island

Back to the archivist story though, photos unearthed by a Christchurch archivist  Matthew O'Sullivan, could prove Earhart spent her final days as a castaway on a remote island north of New Zealand, and that she didn't, as some believe, die in a plane crash. 
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) has long theorised that after Earhart's plane went off course while en-route to Howland Island, the pair made a safe landing on a reef near Nikumaroro Island in Kiribati, previously Gardner Island, and made it safely to shore, living out the rest of their days as castaways.

THE photo, Nikumaroro Island, apparently showing the wreckage

O'Sullivan was rifling through his collection of aerial films and came across one with an entry saying 'unnamed atoll'. He notified Tighar of his find, and the group responded, telling O'Sullivan he had discovered the ''complete set of aerial obliques taken on December 1, 1938'' by an aircraft of the New Zealand Pacific Aviation Survey. They believe the photos, taken two years after she went missing, show where Earhart's plane went down. A representative from Tighar was now organising a trip to New Zealand with a forensic imaging specialist to conduct further research.
It should be relatively easy to ascertain whether or not if the splodge on the photo is the wreckage, we await further developments.