Youngest Impact Crater on Earth Buried Under Greenland Ice

“We also found many small grains of shock-melted glass, which both contained fragments of shocked minerals and a lot of finely dispersed organic material. This could not have been incorporated into the glass unless is also itself had been shocked, disintegrated and mixed with the molten rock from the impact.”

With support from other types of analysis of the organic material, the scientists were eventually convinced that the charred wood stemmed from the impact and not from natural wildfires, which could be an alternative explanation for the charring.

Identification of the wood

The researchers also found out that from preserved cell structures in the charred wood that it stems from conifer trees such as pine, spruce and perhaps larch.

“Today, no conifer trees can grow in the northernmost parts of Greenland at about 80 degrees north, but remnants of thin conifer forests are known from two warmer periods at 2.4 and 3 million years ago, and the meteorite impact therefore took place at or after this time,” Adam Garde explains.

He elaborates that actually, there has also been conifer vegetation in North Greenland during still older warm periods several million years ago, but any organic remains from those much older forests would have been much more downgraded than the wood recovered from the crater.

Searching for exact age

In the first paper from 2018 that described the discovery of the Hiawatha crater, the authors suggested a very young age of the impact, not least because the internal layering of the Greenland Ice Sheet is strongly disturbed precisely where it covers the crater. However, it was difficult to argue for a precise age.

According to the authors, “Now, with the identification of conifer charcoal, we can at least determine a maximum age with confidence, although an exact age determination is still missing.”

“Perhaps we now have some new means of obtaining not only a maximum age but also an absolute age. In the coming months we will try to analyze the trace uranium and lead contents of some highly shocked minerals, which we have discovered in material collected last summer. This may yield an absolute, so-called radiometric age of the impact,” says the first author.

Adam Garde further explains that if the impact crater is in fact very young, it can be used in climate research.

“If the age of the crater overlaps with the age of ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet, it will be possible to study how such a large impact might affect the Earth’s climate. Such information is potentially hidden in the ice cores, which cover a time span up to about 100,000 years back in time. But this requires much more precise information of the age of the crater than we have at present.”

The study

The study is published in the journal Geology and is based on collaboration between scientists at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, the Globe Institute (University of Copenhagen), the Institute of Geoscience (Aarhus University) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany.

Pleistocene organic matter modified by the Hiawatha impact, northwest Greenland
Adam A. Garde et al.  

URL:  https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/doi/10.1130/G47432.1/586763/Pleistocene-organic-matter-modified-by-the

The discovery of the Hiawatha impact crater was published in ScienceAdvances in 2018 and was nominated the same year by Science magazine for the most important scientific discovery of the year. Read the 2018 article here: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173/

Contacts and sources:
Kea Giles
Geological Society of America
Adam Garde
Emeritus, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS)