Scientists Discover Immense, 460-Mile-Long Canyon Under Greenland's Ice Sheet

Using data from NASA's Operation IceBridge and other airborne campaigns, scientists led by a team from the University of Bristol have found that an enormous, 460-mile-long canyon runs from near the center of Greenland northward to the fjord of the Petermann Glacier. 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. Hidden for all of human history, this immense feature is longer than the Grand Canyon and is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

Transcript

00:00:00 [music] Buried under a mile of ice, it's never been seen by human eyes. But using ice-penetrating radar, scientists have discovered a giant canyon carved into Greenland’s bedrock. More than 400 miles long and up to a half mile deep, shown here as the dark brown groove in the center of the island, the canyon is thought to pre-date Greenland's massive ice sheet. The hidden feature was discovered by a team led by the University of Bristol, using radar data from a number of airborne campaigns from the United Kingdom and Germany, and a NASA mission

00:00:41 called Operation IceBridge, which surveys this region with a range of different instruments every year to monitor changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet. From the interior of Greenland, the canyon snakes around up to the fjord of the Petermann Glacier on the northern coast, and researchers suspect it may play a major role in transporting melt water below the ice into the Arctic Ocean. [chimes]