A survey of ice in Greenland has uncovered evidence suggesting a kilometer-wide iron asteroid slammed into that island, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene. The resulting 19-mile-wide impact crater has remained hidden under a half-mile-thick ice sheet until now. It recently was exposed by an ultra-wideband chirp radar system developed at the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS), headquartered at the University of Kansas.
A survey of ice in Greenland has uncovered evidence suggesting a kilometer-wide iron asteroid slammed into that island, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene. The resulting 19-mile-wide impact crater has remained hidden under a half-mile-thick ice sheet until now. It recently was exposed by an ultra-wideband chirp radar system developed at the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS), headquartered at the University of Kansas.
The impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in remote northwest Greenland is detailed in a new paper in Science Advances published today.
It was identified with data collected between 1997 and 2014 by KU for NASA’s Program for Arctic Regional Climate Assessment and Operation IceBridge, and supplemented with more data collected in May 2016 using the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS) developed at KU.
Read more at University of Kansas
Photo: A photo illustration shows the airplane, radar waves and actual radar image. CREDIT: NASA
