We may have our eye turned towards exploring infinite , but evidently , there ’s still very much here on Earth we have yet to see . After collecting data for long time , scientist have just announced the discovery of a 460 - mile - long canyon underneath Greenland ’s frappe sheet , make it even longer than our own Grand Canyon — and no homo has ever laid eyes on it before .
Hidden by a thick layer of ice for the entirety of humanity , the half - mile - deep canyon was uncovered thanks to an ice - penetrating radar , which uncover something mimicking the physical body of a winding river . accord to Jonathan Bamber , a prof of physical geographics at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and pass generator on the study :
One might get into that the landscape of the Earth has been to the full explore and mapped . Our research designate there ’s still a lot left to discover .
It ’s only just now that we ’re notice this massive geological complex body part thanks ( partially ) to thousands of miles of airborne radar datum that NASA has been collecting from the United Kingdom and Germany for several decades . The rest of the datum came from NASA ’s airborne science campaign Operation IceBridge ’s own data get between 2009 and 2012 . Specifically , something call the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder — one of the IceBridge ’s instruments and the pièce de résistance that made this whole discovery potential — was what reserve the research worker to see through implausibly thick layer of ice to the bedrock below .
When they tune up their radars to just the right frequence , the scientists were able to beam out radio wave that would travel through the ice , bounce off the bedrock underneath , and issue forth all the room back up . Meaning the longer a radiowave take to come barreling back , the inscrutable that special bit of canyon is .
And though we ’re almost irrefutable that the canyon forgo human race , scientists have reasonableness to believe that it amount before Greenland ’s massive , overlie icing sheet , as well . In fact , evidence seems to suggest that about 4 million years ago , water flowed into the canon from Greenland ’s inside and back out into the Atlantic ocean .
The IceBridge run wo n’t head back to Iceland ’s parky shore again until March 2014 , but when it does , it ’s clear that there ’s still very much to look forward to . [ NASA ]
Science
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