Source: Sky news and Edited by Meghana Kurup
A large crater believed to have been caused by an asteroid that slammed into Earth nearly 12,000 years ago has been found beneath the ice in Greenland.
The 19-mile-wide impact had remained hidden under a half-mile-thick sheet of ice located under the Hiawatha Glacier in remote northwest Greenland and was discovered by a state-of-the-art radar system at the University of Kansas on Wednesday.
The 19-mile-wide crater believed to have been caused by an asteroid remained hidden for 12,000 years https://t.co/V9JOkryCdd
— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 15, 2018
The crater is thought to be the result of an iron asteroid about one kilometre in size that struck the island at the end of the Pleistocene period that began nearly 26 million years ago.
It took almost two decades to identify the crater, with most of the data needed collected between 1997 and 2014, and the findings have now been detailed in a new paper for the latest edition of Science Advance.