Yahoo News NASA spots signs of ‘22-mile-wide crater buried a mile beneath the ice’ in Greenland
NASA researchers have spotted possible signs of a huge, ancient impact crater buried a mile beneath the ice in Greenland.
The potential find follows the discovery of a 19-mile-wide crater beneath Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier in November last year.
The two sites are just 114 miles apart – and NASA glacologist Joe McGregor found the new crater by checking topographic maps of hte land beneath the ice.
Using imagery of the ice surface from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instruments aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, he noticed a circular pattern some 114 miles to the southeast of Hiawatha Glacier.
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MacGregor said, ‘We’ve surveyed the Earth in many different ways, from land, air and space—it’s exciting that discoveries like these are still possible.
‘I began asking myself ‘Is this another impact crater? Do the underlying data support that idea?’
‘Helping identify one large impact crater beneath the ice was already very exciting, but now it looked like there could be two of them.’
‘The only other circular structure that might approach this size would be a collapsed volcanic caldera,’ MacGregor said.
‘But the areas of known volcanic activity in Greenland are several hundred miles away. Also, a volcano should have a clear positive magnetic anomaly, and we don’t see that at all.’
