Greenland's Mega Canyon (narrated video)

  • Released Thursday, August 29, 2013

Hidden for all of human history, a 460 mile long canyon has been discovered below Greenland's ice sheet. Using radar data from NASA's Operation IceBridge and other airborne campaigns, scientists led by a team from the University of Bristol found the canyon runs from near the center of the island northward to the fjord of the Petermann Glacier.

A large portion of the data was collected by IceBridge from 2009 through 2012. One of the mission's scientific instruments, the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, operated by the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.

This is a narrated version of an visualization that can be found, along with more detailed information, at

Greenland's Mega-Canyon beneath the Ice Sheet (#4097).



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Release date

This page was originally published on Thursday, August 29, 2013.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:51 PM EDT.


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