Ice‑Breakin’ Meteorite: A 31 km Crater Found Beneath Greenland’s Ice
Imagine a huge iron meteorite crashing into Greenland about 12,000 years ago, leaving a hole bigger than Paris itself. That’s the punchline of a new study, announced Wednesday, that found this massive crater under the slick sheet of sea‑ice that covers the icy nation.
First of Its Kind–and One of the Biggest
With 31 km across, this cavern under the Hiawatha Glacier is the first crater ever spotted beneath any of Earth’s ice caps, and it ranks among the 25 largest known on our planet, the researchers say. They’ve published their findings in Science Advances.
What It Means for the World
- Regional Chaos – The impact would have hurlled rock and heat into the atmosphere, potentially melting a chunk of ice.
- Freshwater Flood – A sudden gush of meltwater could have flooded the Nares Strait, shifting ocean currents all the way from Canada to Greenland.
- Ripple Effects – Climate could have been nudged, maybe even globally, as the whole world tasted a new dose of extraterrestrial debris.
Eyebrows Raised: The Research Team
“We’re still hammering out the exact age, but the crater’s worn‑out look suggests it came after the Greenland Ice Sheet formed,” says co‑author John Paden, a Kansas University associate professor. He likened the “falling snow” of debris to a fresh flood of freshwater that would have thrown ocean currents into a whirlpool.
Professor Kurt Kjaer, from the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, adds that the event might have occurred right after glaciers took over Earth’s dome—no older than three million years, and possibly as recent as the tail end of the last ice age.
From 2015 to Now: Tracking the Aerial Trail
The first hint came in 2015 using data from NASA’s Arctic Regional Climate Assessment and Operation IceBridge. Since then, the international crew has hunted for more clues, tapping into newer radar tech to scan the ice’s hidden depths.
Future Work: Drilling Down Into the Past
Scientists plan to drill into the meltwater trapped at the glacier’s bottom. “We aim to snag anything that survived the crash,” says the team. Those samples could finally pin down when that meteorite danced with ice and how the event nudged life and landscapes across the globe.
When the Celestial Meets the Chill
So there it is— a gargantuan crater, a forgotten piece of cosmic history, hiding under Greenland’s frosty veil. When science finally pulls down the curtain, we’ll get to see the exact timeline of that meteorite’s icy rendezvous, and maybe how it turned the planet into a more colorful, if slightly unhinged, canvas.
