The oldest crater in the world!

You had heard before about the crater located in Greenland called Hiawatha, it is one of the oldest in existence and new research on the 31 kilometers wide crater, buried under a kilometer of ice in Greenland, claim that its impact occurred a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs being more exact, it is 58 million years old.

Leading theories were that the crater-causing asteroid hit Earth 13,000 years ago, when humans were already on the planet, or that the impact may have triggered a nearly 1,000-year period of global cooling.

This crater was discovered when scientists examined radar images they obtained of the Greenland bedrock. The evidence that led geologists to believe that it was the crater caused by a meteorite that crashed into the Earth, were the quartz sediments found in the waters of the Hiawatha Glacier and that appear to have been subjected to enormous pressure.

The crater below Hiawatha Glacier is larger than 90% of the approximately 200 known impact craters on Earth. It is much smaller than the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico, which is about 200 km wide and caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. However, experts believe that its impact devastated the region and perhaps caused severe changes to the climate and plant and animal life.

Interesting, isn’t it?