Washington: A NASA scientist has discovered a possible second impact crater, with a width of over 36 kilometres (km), buried under ice in northwest Greenland, the US space agency said. This follows the discovery of a over 30-km-wide crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier — the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under Earth’s ice sheets — announced in November last year.
Though the newly found impact sites in northwest Greenland are only 183 km apart, at present they do not appear to have formed at the same time, NASA said in a statement.If the second crater is ultimately confirmed as the result of a meteorite impact, it will be the 22nd largest impact crater found on Earth, according to the findings published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“We have surveyed the Earth in many different ways, from land, air and space — it is exciting that discoveries like these are still possible,” said Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the US, who participated in both findings. Before the discovery of the Hiawatha impact crater, scientists generally assumed that most evidence of past impacts in Greenland and Antarctica would have been wiped away by unrelenting erosion by the overlying ice. Following the finding of that first crater, MacGregor checked topographic maps of the rock beneath Greenland’s ice for signs of other craters.
