Scientists Spot What May Be a Giant Impact Crater Hidden Under Greenland Ice

Scientists Spot What May Be a Giant Impact Crater Hidden Under Greenland Ice https://www.eresviral.com

Scientists Spot What May Be a Giant Impact Crater Hidden Under Greenland Ice







The Earth hides its scars well; The planet has suffered countless millennia of eruptions and collisions, but scientists still find evidence of all that. geological drama.



	

	Now, one of those teams has announced that it discovered a scar hidden under the ice of Greenland, a giant crater almost 20 miles (31 kilometers) wide. The researchers said that a giant iron meteorite He probably created the mark by crashing into Earth sometime in the last 3 million years.

		Other scientists are not necessarily sold yet, since a space rock created the feature. "I think the authors have presented some intriguing evidence of a possible impact site, and I think that's the right word, intrigued," said David Kring, who studies impact craters at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston and was not involved. . The new investigation, he told Space.com. "I'm intrigued, I'm not totally convinced that this is an impact crater."

The[[In pictures: The giant crater below Greenland explained]

		The feature in question lies beneath the edge of the ice sheet in northwest Greenland, lending a semicircular edge to the ice sheet near where a glacier called Hiawatha flows into the sea. Looking through the data originally gathered to track Changes in the ice itself.The scientists detected a strangely circular feature in the bedrock, so they organized a radar instrument with high ice penetration to fly over the area.





						


An aerial view of northwest Greenland, with the location of what appears to be a giant impact crater in a red circle.

            						    Credit: Museum of Natural History of Denmark. 


		The data of that instrument confirmed the structure of the characteristic itself: a depression large enough to hold all of Paris in its embrace, with a clearly defined edge in every way. Then, the scientists flew to collect samples in person, looking for chemical fingerprints of a exotic event that could have formed the characteristic.

		And while the glacier prevents scientists from reaching the heart of the crater, it compensates for this inconvenience by transporting the sediment from the site in melting water. "It's almost like a home delivery," Kurt Kjær, lead author of the study and a geologist at the Danish Museum of Natural History at the University of Copenhagen, told Space.com.

		Among those sediments, geologists found what they think they are. quartz beads in shock, the result of the force of an impact abruptly melting the rock. The team also analyzed the chemistry of the sample, finding an unusual fingerprint of rhodium, platinum and palladium. "We do not tend to find that in many rocks that we find on Earth," Iain McDonald, a geochemist at Cardiff University in the US, told Space.com. UU Who did that analysis "I'm quite convinced of what's there."





						


Artistic representation of the potential meteor that enters the atmosphere towards Greenland.

            						    Credit: Denmark Museum of Natural History, Cryospheric Science Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., USA UU 


		There is another twist in the crater puzzle: in Kjær's own institution is a large iron meteorite that was found about 185 miles (300 km) from the crater's site. Could it be that the meteorite and the crater originated from the same incoming asteroid that breaks in the Earth's atmosphere as it falls to the surface? "I think it's fair to start speculating if those two are linked," Kjær said. "Maybe we found the house of this meteorite, that would be fun."

		But Kring is not as convinced as the research team that the feature really has a extraterrestrial origin. "There are thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of circular structures on the surface of the Earth," said Kring. "Almost none of them are impact craters." He said he would also like to see more solid evidence from the rock analysis that the feature was actually caused by an impact, rather than by some other process.

The[[Photos: hunting meteorites from Florida Fireball in Osceola]



	He said he is particularly impressed by the apparent lack of any measurable climatic agitation    that such a large impact would have caused. The team wants to reduce the date more accurately for future research, but is confident that the crater was formed about 3 million and 12,000 years ago, probably at the end of that range. "Certainly, it should have created global effects, and we do not have any clues or signs of that at this time," Kring said.

		(Kjær said that, depending on when exactly the characteristic was formed, it may coincide with the strong cooling of the Younger Dryas period, which ended about 11,500 years ago, but it is certainly too early to say).

		However, Kring said he is happy that the team is moving forward on ways to identify unknown features on the surface of the Earth and understand how the planet changed over time. And if the site really turns out to be an impact, studying it in more detail could offer a useful vision for planetary protection, which considers the potentially devastating effects that future impacts of ongoing hail from the planetary material could cause.

		"[Asteroids] In fact, they are a threat to human civilization, "said Kring. We want to better understand the consequences if one of those objects hits the Earth or when, and one way to do it is to enter the geological record and measure those impacts. "

		For Kjær, the most exciting thing is neither the dramatic collision nor its possible successors, it is the fact of tripping over something unknown. "Look here: the era of discovery is not over yet," he said. "We can still go out and find things that we did not see before."

		The research is described in a paper Published today (November 14) in the journal Science Advances.



	Email Meghan Bartels in mbartels@space.com or follow it @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom    Y Facebook. Original article about Space.com.

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