NASA airborne science mission has help reveal evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden a mile under Greenland ice.
The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon.
In some places, it is as deep as 2,600 feet (800 meters), on scale with segments of the Grand Canyon.
This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.
“One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped,” Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the study, said.
“Our research shows there’s still a lot left to discover,” he said.
The scientists used thousands of miles of airborne radar data, collected by NASA and researchers from the United Kingdom and Germany over several decades, to piece together the landscape lying beneath the Greenland ice sheet.
A large portion of this data was collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA’s Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice.
One of IceBridge’s scientific instruments, the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.
The findings are published in the journal Science. (ANI)