Ice age crater discovered beneath Greenland glacier

Ice age crater discovered beneath Greenland glacier

News:

1. 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:

2. This is the first time that a crater of any size has been found under one of Earth’s continental ice sheets.
3. The researchers worked for last three years to verify their discovery, initially made in the 2015.
4. The research is described in a new study just published in the internationally recognized journal Science Advances.
5. 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.