An impact crater with a diameter of 31 kilometers can be found at the northwest coast of Greenland. It is hiding beneath a kilometer of ice and a number of mysteries. One of them might have just been solved.
Image by Thomas Breher from Pixabay
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In the year 2015 NASA was studying Greenland’s ice thickness using airborne radars. In this process they found a large impact crater hiding in the northwest of Greenland about a kilometer under the ice. A big crater and on top of that under the ice? That’s literally a scientific mystery magnet.
One of the biggest mysteries of the crater named Hiawatha is how old is it. Some experts connected it with the strange cooling period about 13,000 years ago. But everyone wanted to know how old the crater is. But it wasn’t easy to figure out.
Geochemist Gavin Kenny from the Swedish museum Naturhistoriska riskmuseet in Stockholm and his colleagues dated the discovered impact evidence using two independent methods of radioisotope dating. Each based on a different isotope. The age of the zircon crystals was found by dating uranium/lead (U/Pb) while the sand with evidence of melting was dated with argon-argon dating (40Ar/39Ar). Both methods came to the came conclusion. The crater is about 58 million years old.
The dating is quite convincing yet there are always some doubts. If the age of the crater is correct then it obviously had no effect 13,000 years ago in the ice age that began. Many scientists still believe that this ice-age was caused by some cosmic object hitting the Earth.
The age also seems to suggest it isn’t connected to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) episode during which the Earth was suddenly warmed up by a lot about 56 million years ago. So, we have a crater (and not a small one) which we cannot connect to any climate swings and no serious extinction events. The mystery lives on.
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