WASHINGTON - An immense crater in north-western Greenland, buried under a thick sheet of ice and first spotted in 2015, is much older than previously suspected - formed by a meteorite impact 58 million years ago, rather than 13,000 years ago as had been proposed. Scientists said on Wednesday (March 9) they used two different dating methods on sand and.
Some time in the past, an asteroid a kilometer across slammed down into Greenland at a speed at least a dozen times faster than a rifle bullet. Releasing as much energy as 15,000 times the largest nuclear weapon ever exploded on Earth, it carved out a gigantic crater now called Hiawatha Crater, and it's over 30 kilometers across.
This much is known. The big question is, when did this happen?
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An immense crater in northwestern Greenland, buried under a thick sheet of ice and first spotted in 2015, is muc.
Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide meteorite crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice.
An immense crater in northwestern Greenland, buried under a thick sheet of ice and first spotted in 2015, is much older than previously suspected - formed by a meteorite impact 58 million years ago, rather than 13,000 years ago as had been proposed.