In the week after her plane vanished on July 2, 1937, there were 120 reports from around the world claiming to have picked up radio signals and distress calls from Earhart – 57 of which were determined to be credible.

An effort led by Richard Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, analyzed these final transmissions, painting a haunting image of their increasingly desperate situation over the course of seven days.

Challenging one of the widely held theories, which claims her Lockheed Electra crashed and sank in the ocean, the distress calls suggest Earhart and a severely injured Fred Noonan were stranded on a reef, at the mercy of the tides.

The comprehensive new study from TIGHAR's Earhart Project picks apart each distress call received in the week after the pilot's disappearance, revealing an hour-by-hour chronology of the events that transpired.