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A hole larger than the city of Paris has recently been discovered in Greenland.
The reason it was so far unnoticed is that it was hidden under the ice of the Greenlandic Hiawatha Glacier.
The 31 km wide depression was discovered when scientists examined the radar images obtained from the island's rock base and suggest that could be a crater result of the impact of a ferrous asteroid 1.5 km wide.
If confirmed, the Crater would be the first to be observed in one of layers of ice covering our planet Earth.
The discovery was published in the journal Science Advance but the team behind the survey, composed of staff members from different universities and museums around the world, did not still failed to reveal all his secrets .
A mystery to be solved …
"The Crater is Exceptionally Well Preserved and it is surprising, because the ice of the glacier is an incredibly effective erosive agent that would have quickly eliminated the traces of the impact, "Professor Kurt H. Kjaer of the Museum's Geogenetics Center told the press. of natural history of Denmark.
The evidence that lead geologists to think that it is a meteorite that crashed on Earth is quartz [séduisant] It is found in the waters of Hiawatha Glacier and they seem to have been under tremendous pressure.
Scientists think that this can only be explained by a huge impact
but it is an important fact that they have not yet been able to reveal: the moment when this collision occurred .
. They think it could have happened only 12,000 or 3 million years ago, but until they manage to drill the 1,000-meter ice that allows them to take samples in the crater itself, they can not be more precise, they say.
… that would explain a lot of other things
If it had happened 12,000 years ago, in the Pleistocene it would be a relatively young meteorite and could explain other phenomena that occurred simultaneously.
M. Iain McDonald of Cardiff University, UK, thinks he can explain even a return to the Ice Age .
"If we can to establish that it is so young, we can relate it to a climatic phenomenon that we call the Dryas Reciente a cooling period of the Earth that affected the northern hemisphere for about 1,000 years, "said the researcher. on the BBC radio broadcast Today .
It is in this same period that they extinguished mammoths . According to McDonald, the discovery of the crater could be at the origin of its extinction and the disappearance of a civilization the clobis, one of the oldest in North America that lived 14,000 years ago.
Before, he warned, they must have access to the rock and be able to accurately determine when the impact of what they think is a meteor is product. Download the new version of our application and activate them to not miss our best content.
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