Previously, the crater was thought to be 13,000 years old.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON – A large crater in northwest Greenland, buried under a thick layer of ice and first seen in 2015. The crater was formed by a meteorite impact 58 million years ago. Previously, this crater was thought to be from 13,000 years ago.
Scientists say they used two different dating methods on the remaining sand and rock to determine the age of the 31 km wide crater. They found that a meteorite about one to 1.5-2 km in diameter hit Greenland about eight million years after a larger asteroid impact on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula wiped out the dinosaurs. Both methods used yielded the same age results.
“Thus, the impact did not occur or cause climate change events in human times as previously proposed and speculated,” said Swedish Museum of Natural History geologist Gavin Kenny.
The crater is located under Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier, covered by a one km deep layer of ice. This condition remained undetected until airborne ice-penetrating radar data alerted scientists to its existence.
The crater is one of the 25 largest known craters on Earth. Over thousands of years, Earth has been hit by space rocks time and time again, although gradual changes in the planet’s surface have erased or obscured many craters.
Greenland during the Paleocene Age was not the icy place it is today. In fact, this place has the opposite condition, a temperate rainforest area inhabited by various trees and inhabited by a few mammals that became the dominant land animals on Earth after the dinosaurs became extinct.
The meteorite released millions of times more energy than an atomic bomb, leaving a crater large enough to engulf the city of Washington. “The impact will be devastating to the local area,” said Kenny.
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