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Ice age crater discovered beneath Greenland glacier
News:
- An international team lead by researchers University of Copenhagen in Denmark have discovered a 31-km wide meteorite impact crater buried beneath the ice-sheet in the northern Greenland.
Important Facts:
- This is the first time that a crater of any size has been found under one of Earth’s continental ice sheets.
- The researchers worked for last three years to verify their discovery, initially made in the 2015.
- The research is described in a new study just published in the internationally recognized journal Science Advances.
- About the Crater:
- The crater measures more than 31 km in diameter, corresponding to an area bigger than Paris, and placing it among the 25 largest impact craters on Earth.
- The impact crater is large enough to swallow the District of Columbia and is the first impact crater found beneath one of our planet’s ice sheets.
- Formation: The finding suggests that a giant iron asteroid smashed into during the last ice age, an era known as the Pleistocene Epoch that started 2.6 million years ago.