Nineteen-Mile-Wide Crater Is Discovered Under Greenland's Ice

A giant meteor crater five times the size of Paris has been found half a mile (0.8 km) under the ice in Greenland.

It is one of the largest impact craters on Earth, and suggests a 3,300ft-wide (1,000-metre) object made of iron smashed into our planet during the last Ice Age.

It is believed the resulting explosion threw debris several hundred miles in every direction, reaching as far as modern day Canada.

The 12-billion-tonne meteor landed with the power of 47 million Hiroshima bombs, obliterating all life within a 60-mile (100 km) radius, scientists said.

A 19-mile-wide (30 km) impact crater left by the event remained hidden for at least 12,000 years beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in remote north-west Greenland, although scientists have not categorically dated the event. It could be as long ago as three million years when Greenland’s ice sheet had already begun to form.

This Cold Heaven: Seve... Gretel Ehrlich Best Price: $3.49 Buy New $9.54 (as of 10:15 UTC - Details) The crater was identified with data collected between 1997 and 2014, supplemented with more collected in 2016 using an advanced form of radar sounding.

Study co-author Dr John Paden, a computer scientist at Kansas University, said: ‘We’ve collected lots of radar-sounding data over the last couple of decades.

‘Glaciologists put these radar-sounding datasets together to produce maps of what Greenland is like underneath the ice.

‘Danish researchers were looking at the map and saw this big, crater-like depression under the ice sheet and looked at satellite imagery and – because the crater is on edge of the ice sheet – you can see a circular pattern there as well.

‘The two combined made a really strong case for this being an impact-crater site.’

The scars of the meteorite smash have been preserved since then after being buried underneath ice more than a kilometre thick.

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