Privacy Policy

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Expedition Titanic

Search for Amelia Earhart

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished without a trace during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world at the equator.

In early 2009, the Waitt Institute conducted an extensive deep-sea search for Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra aircraft in the area of the South Pacific where many researchers believe she crashed. The expedition, known as CATALYST 2, involved assembling a diverse group of experts from multiple backgrounds and institutions to identify areas to search for Earhart’s plane. The CATALYST team then utilized the Waitt Institute’s REMUS 6000 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles to survey over 2,000 square miles of ocean floor at an average depth of 5,200 meters.

The Electra was not found during the expedition, but the data from the sea floor created a 2,000 square-mile exclusion zone where we now know the plane is not located. For the benefit of future researchers, the Waitt Institute is sharing all of these results, as well as a provocative, first-hand account of life aboard ship, at a specially designed new website known as Search for Amelia. One of the most comprehensive digital records on the life and legacy of Amelia Earhart available today, Search for Amelia is a collaborative site where comments and ideas about Earhart and her final flight are invited and encouraged.

Explore the expedition’s website

View videos from the CATALYST 2 Expedition Log

NGS/Waitt Grants

The National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program helps qualified and experienced individuals launch the most difficult stage of a project for which to secure funding—the search. Grants are made for exploratory fieldwork that holds promise for new breakthroughs in the natural and social sciences. NGS/Waitt Grants applications are processed throughout the year and grants are awarded expeditiously to help researchers take advantage of immediate opportunities. The NGS/Waitt grants are an initiative of the National Geographic Society and the Waitt Institute.

Funded through a five-year grant from the Waitt Foundation, the NGS/Waitt Grants Program is administered by National Geographic Mission Programs and makes approximately one hundred grants annually of $5,000 to $15,000. Proposals are considered as they are received and awards are made within weeks of application.

The Waitt Grants Program upholds rigorous standards of review and scientific merit, but does not shy away from risky or unproven ideas. In that spirit, NGS/Waitt Grants support projects at the cutting edge of technology and research. The Program encourages applicants to think big—but travel light—as they look toward new frontiers around the globe. Grants are made to explorers and scientists in research fields such as biology, anthropology, and the geosciences who are working across disciplines and reacting quickly to field opportunities.

The NGS/Waitt Grants Program targets nascent initiatives and untested concepts that may have trouble finding funding through traditional sources. Where time is short and the stakes are high, NGS/Waitt Grants can ensure that opportunities for discovery are undertaken. The NGS/Waitt Grants Program is a collaboration of the National Geographic Society and the Waitt Institute, and is made possible by a grant from the Waitt Foundation.

Funding Partner

Protecting our oceans, restoring the seas to full productivity and inspiring us to make informed choices.

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Waitt Institute for Discovery

The Waitt Institute respects our visitors’ right to privacy online. We hold your information in confidence. This Privacy Policy applies to all of the products, services and Web sites supported by the Waitt Institute and all affiliated organizations and Web sites.

Asking for Your Information
We will sometimes ask for personal information such as your name, address, e-mail address, occupation and other details. By providing your information to us, we can deliver the most relevant educational information to you that we believe you would like to hear about. When you choose to give personal information to us over the Internet that we request, we will always endeavor to inform you how we will use the information.

When we ask for personal information for any reason, we will provide a link to this Privacy Policy to help make our intentions clear.

Personal Privacy Information
The Waitt Institute will take appropriate steps to keep your personal information confidential. Those steps include limiting access to visitor information databases, communicating this policy statement to all employees and establishing and enforcing penalties for violating this statement.

The Waitt Institute will not sell, rent or give away our visitors’ personal information to others for use in selling products or services. When we do identify an organization that can use visitor information to further an appropriate charitable or educational purpose, we will insist on binding agreements from those organizations protecting our information. We will vigorously enforce all privacy agreements we have with other organizations.

We may share with third parties certain aggregated, non-personal information such as the number of people searching for a particular term; however, such information will not identify you individually.

We gather personal information from visitors to our site so we can better develop our relationship with those visitors and pursue our charitable mission more effectively. Occasionally, we seek comments on our public programs. These comments allow us to determine which programs members of the public should be made aware of based on their specific needs.

We may communicate with visitors via e-mail or other online delivery devices only if the visitor agrees to receive those communications. Members of the public, who believe they are receiving our communications in error or who no longer desire to receive them, should inform us and we will remove those clients’ names from our mailing lists. The Waitt Institute will be judicious in the use of e-mail and paper mail to communicate with members of the public. We will, at all times, put ourselves in the place of the recipients of our mail and treat recipients as we ourselves would like to be treated.

The Waitt Institute may partner with others to provide our visitors with enhanced Internet services. In providing such services, our partners also may request personal information from our clients. We prohibit these partners from selling or giving away our visitor information, and we require they have a posted Privacy Policy that visitors may review before providing personal information.

In addition, we may provide links to sites that operate under different privacy practices. We encourage our visitors to review the privacy policies of such sites before providing any personal information. Although we cannot control the use of information provided to such third parties, we will try to link only to those sites with suitable privacy policies.

Personal Privacy Information Changes
Should the Waitt Institute propose to use personal information for any purposes other than those described in this policy or specific policy notices, we will offer you an effective way to opt-out of the use of personal information for those other purposes.

Security
The Waitt Institute takes appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access to your personal information, storing all such information in a secure area. Access to such information is strictly monitored to include only employees, contractors and agents who need to know such information to operate, develop or improve our services. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations.

Cookies
The Waitt Institute currently uses “cookies” on our sites that tag each visitor’s browser with a random, unique number and do not disclose any personal information about the person using the browser. By noting where these uniquely numbered browsers go on our site, we can study traffic patterns and improve our site.

While most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, you can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, should you elect to do so, some features of this and other Waitt Institute sites may not function properly.

Log Information
When you access any of the Waitt Institute sites, our servers automatically record the information your browser sends whenever you visit any site. These logs may include information such as your Web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, date and time of your request and more.

User Communications
We may retain e-mail or other communication you send to the Waitt Institute or affiliated Web sites and organizations to enable us to respond to your inquiries and improve our services.

Changes to Privacy Policy
The Waitt Institute Privacy Policy may change from time to time, but we will not reduce your rights under this policy without your specific consent. Any changes to our Privacy Policy will be posted on this page.

Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this site, or the information you have submitted please contact us here.