Scientists from the University of Copenhagen, thanks to NASA satellite images, discovered a huge crater in Greenland with a diameter of 31 kilometers and a depth of 800 meters.
The crater is hidden under the Hiawatha Glacier in northwestern Greenland.
It was formed during the Pleistocene period, which began 2.5 million years ago and ended about 12 thousand years ago.
Scientists cannot yet name the exact date of the crater's appearance.
It is reported that a crater of this size could have left a kilometer-long iron meteorite, and as a result of the explosion from its fall, earth and stones would scatter several hundred miles in each direction, even reaching Canada.
Such a meteorite weighed 12 billion tons and it crashed into the ground with a power of 47 million times the power of the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima. The meteorite destroyed everything within a radius of 100 km.
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The crater was discovered after scientists reviewed NASA imagery collected from 1997 to 2016, as well as information obtained using radar surveys of the area.
When in 2015 researchers saw a rounded edge protruding from the glacier in one of the images, they began to examine the area more closely and found a large amount of minerals at the edges of the glacier, characteristic of meteorite craters.
According to Professor Kurt Kjer, a researcher at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, the explosion had disastrous consequences for all life in this place. However, even if it happened already in those years when mankind was actively spreading across the planet, it did not affect people, since the Eskimos 12 thousand years ago had not yet settled in Greenland.
The explosion had a long-term impact, because it melted a lot of ice, as a result of which the flow of fresh water rushed into the strait and this could affect the ocean currents.
The findings were published in Science Advances.