Visualizations by
Cindy Starr
Released on November 14, 2018
The series of visualizations below are derived from satellite imagery and radar sounding. They portray both the location and size of the 31-kilometer-wide impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier. They also portray the structure of the glacier ice that flows into and fills the crater.
The Hiawatha impact crater was first suspected to exist in the summer of 2015, from examination of a compilation of Greenland's sub-ice topography radar measurements made by NASA over two decades. The visualizations of the subsurface shown below are derived from a spring 2016 airborne survey by Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute, using a new ultrawideband radar sounder developed by the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at The University of Kansas. Subsequent helicopter visits to the deglaciated terrain in front of Hiawatha Glacier by scientists from the Natural History Museum in Denmark recovered sediment samples from the main river that discharges water from beneath Hiawatha Glacier, through the northwestern rim breach. Laboratory examination revealed that these sediment samples contained shocked quartz and elevated platinum-group-element concentrations, both signs that the sediment records evidence of the impact of an iron asteroid more than one kilometer wide. The Hiawatha impact crater is potentially one of the youngest large impact craters on Earth.
In the visualizations below, the elevation of the topography of the bed, the ice surface and the radar curtains have been exaggerated ten times in order to better illustrate their structure.
WorldView-1, WorldView-2, and WorldView-3, GeoEye-1/ArcticDEM 5-meter Digital Surface Model Release 4 also referred to as: ArcticDEM 5-meter Digital Surface Model Release 4
Data Compilation - National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency/National Science Foundation
GCMD keywords can be found on the Internet with the following citation:
Olsen, L.M., G. Major, K. Shein, J. Scialdone, S. Ritz, T. Stevens, M. Morahan, A. Aleman, R. Vogel, S. Leicester, H. Weir, M. Meaux, S. Grebas, C.Solomon, M. Holland, T. Northcutt, R. A. Restrepo, R. Bilodeau, 2013. NASA/Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Earth Science Keywords. Version 8.0.0.0.0