The First Impact Crater Found Underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet (9 of 9) (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

The First Impact Crater Found Underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet (9 of 9)

Caption

Close-up of the northwestern ice-sheet margin in Inglefield Land. The Hiawatha impact crater was discovered beneath the semi-circular ice margin. The structure is also imprinted on the shape of the ice surface, even though it lies nearly 1000 meters below the ice surface. Hiawatha is named after outlet glacier at the edge of the ice sheet. The name was given by Lauge Koch in 1922 during an expedition around northern Greenland, while thinking of the pre-colonial native American leader and co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Nov. 14th, 2018, issue of Science Advances, published by AAAS. The paper, by K.H. Kjær at University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues was titled, "A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland."

Credit

[Credit: Natural History Museum of Denmark, Cryospheric Sciences Lab, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA]

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