Meteorite crater bigger than Paris discovered under Greenland glacier
- Enormous bowl-shaped dent appears to be result of meteorite slamming into the island 12,000 years ago
- Crater ranks among the 25 largest known on Earth and is the first to be found beneath an ice sheet
A massive iron meteorite smashed into Greenland as recently as 12,000 years ago, leaving a crater bigger than Paris that was recently discovered beneath the ice with sophisticated radar, researchers said.
The crater is the first of its kind ever found on Greenland – or under any of the Earth’s ice sheets – and is among the 25 largest known on Earth, said the report in the journal Science Advances.
The impact of the 31km-wide crater under the Hiawatha Glacier would have had significant ripple effects in the region, possible even globally, researchers said.
But its story is just beginning to be told.
“There would have been debris projected into the atmosphere that would affect the climate and the potential for melting a lot of ice, so there could have been a sudden freshwater influx into the Nares Strait between Canada and Greenland that would have affected the ocean flow in that whole region,” said co-author John Paden, courtesy associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Kansas University.