An asteroid smashed into Earth, leaving a thirty-one-kilometer-wide, one-kilometer-deep crater. The crater is big enough to contain the entire city of Washington D.C. Today, the crater lies beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in Northwest Greenland.

Clear evidence that the Hiawatha impact disrupted global climate is still lacking. However, the crater’s dating allows the international research team working on the crater to begin testing various hypotheses to better understand what its impact was on both the local and global climate.

Update 2022

Phys.org: The asteroid smashed into Earth, leaving a thirty-one-kilometer-wide, one-kilometer-deep crater. The crater is big enough to contain the entire city of Washington D.C. Today, the crater lies beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in Northwest Greenland. Rivers flowing from the glacier supplied the researchers with sand and rocks that were superheated by the impact 58 million years ago.

Clear evidence that the Hiawatha impact disrupted global climate is still lacking. However, the crater’s dating allows the international research team working on the crater to begin testing various hypotheses to better understand what its impact was on both the local and global climate.

2018

We report the discovery of a large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland. From airborne radar surveys, we identify a 31-kilometer-wide, circular bedrock depression beneath up to a kilometer of ice http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173

Sources

• Discovering a massive meteorite crater https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ9maLsIcts
• Massive crater under Greenland’s ice points to climate-altering impact in the time of humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg0mAihbm58
• International Team, NASA Make Unexpected Discovery Under Greenland Ice https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/international-team-nasa-make-unexpected-discovery-under-greenland-ice

Related

• Hiawatha Glacier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiawatha_Glacier
• Abrupt Climate Change explained by Jim White https://earthclimate.tv/video/abrupt-climate-change-past-present-and-future/