A Massive Meteorite Crater Has Been Hiding Under Greenland’s Ice

Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura

There are still secrets hidden on the vast terrain of Earth.

Three years ago, a team of scientists discovered an unusual shape in a topography map of the land beneath Greenland’s thick ice.

Under the Hiawatha glacier, there was a circular depression. Kurt Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, wondered if, perhaps, it had been made by a meteorite.

Now, after collecting detailed scans and physical clues, an international team of researchers has evidence, published in Science Advances, that this unseen crater was made by a giant rock from space, more than half a mile wide. The resulting indentation is almost 20 miles wide, making it one of the 25 largest impact craters on Earth.

The crater originally showed up on radar scans made as part of ongoing efforts to map the terrain beneath Greenland’s ice. But those scans weren’t detailed enough to resolve the telltale features of impact craters, including peaks formed in the center of the ring. Kjær and his colleagues worked with the NASA glaciologist Joseph MacGregor to organize a survey with a more powerful ice-penetrating radar system, launched from the U.S. military base at Thule.

The picture that those scans produced revealed the exact features the researchers were looking for—a circular rim, the central peaks, and layers of…

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