THE FORGOTTEN APOCALYPSE
The discovery of a massive impact structure beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland has reopened the debate surrounding catastrophic events at the end of the Pleistocene. Located approximately one kilometer below the ice surface, the crater measures almost 20 miles in diameter (32 kilometers), placing it among the larger known terrestrial impact sites.¹ To generate a feature of this magnitude, the impacting object would have required an explosive yield estimated at 700 megatons, orders of magnitude greater than any historic nuclear detonation.² Preliminary analyses suggest the crater was formed by an iron-rich meteorite approximately roughly 0.62–0.93 miles across.³ Although the site remains inaccessible for direct geological sampling due to the ice overburden, remote sensing and radar stratigraphy have provided substantial insights into its morphology and estimated age.
Professor Kurt H. Kjær of the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark has argued that the geomorphological evidence strongly indicates the crater formed after the Greenland Ice Sheet had already developed, potentially as recently as 12,000 years ago, near the end of the last Ice Age.⁴ This temporal placement situates the event within a period of abrupt climatic transitions and widespread ecological disruptions.
John Paden of the University of Kansas notes that such an impact would have triggered global atmospheric perturbations, including high-altitude injection of dust and ejecta, rapid climatic cooling, and extensive melting of surface ice.⁵ The scientific journal Science provides a model illustrating the event’s severity:
“An observer within 500 kilometers would have seen a white fireball four times larger than the Sun and three times brighter. On impact with the ice sheet, the object would have vaporized water and lithic material instantaneously, releasing the equivalent energy of 700 one-megaton nuclear bombs. Even at great distances, the resulting shockwave would have produced a thunderous acoustic pulse accompanied by hurricane-level winds. Subsequent fallout may have deposited debris across North America and Europe.”⁶
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Subsequently, a second crater—approximately 21.75 miles in diameter—was identified beneath the ice only 114 miles from the Hiawatha structure.⁷ From a probabilistic standpoint, the likelihood that two unrelated impactors struck the same region within a geologically brief timeframe is exceedingly low. The more plausible interpretation is that the impacts represent multiple fragments of a single disintegrating comet, analogous to the Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragments that impacted Jupiter in 1994.⁸
These discoveries lend substantial support to hypotheses proposing a widespread bombardment event in the earth’s recent past. Such scenarios have been advanced to explain the near-synchronous disappearance of numerous Late Pleistocene cultures and megafaunal species. Plato’s account of a catastrophic destruction of Atlantis around 11,500 years ago corresponds with this timeline,⁹ as does the abrupt termination of the Clovis culture in North America.¹⁰ Similar collapses or disruptions are suggested for the builders of Nan Madol¹¹ and the megalithic phase at Gunung Padang in Indonesia.¹²
The Greenland subglacial craters stand among the most concrete geological indicators of high-energy impacts during this transitional epoch. As research progresses, they may provide key evidence supporting the proposition that Earth experienced a series of cometary encounters that contributed to rapid environmental change and the extinction or dispersal of Late Pleistocene human populations.
Footnotes
Kjær, K.H., et al. “A Large Impact Crater Beneath Hiawatha Glacier in Northwest Greenland.” Science Advances 4, no. 11 (2018).
Ibid.; see also Melosh, H.J., Impact Cratering: A Geologic Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Kjær et al., “A Large Impact Crater.”
Kjær quoted in Natural History Museum of Denmark press release, 2018.
Paden, J. et al., Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, University of Kansas.
Voosen, P. “Ice-Age Impact?” Science, 2018.
MacGregor, J.A., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, subglacial radar surveys, 2019.
Chodas, P.W., et al. “The Fragmentation of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9.” Astronomical Journal 110, no. 2 (1995).
Plato, Timaeus and Critias, c. 360 BCE.
Waters, M.R. et al. “Redefining the Age of Clovis.” Science Advances 7 (2021).
Bath, B. “Architectural Phases of Nan Madol.” Journal of Pacific Archaeology 5 (2014).
Natawidjaja, D. et al. “Geoarchaeological Studies at Gunung Padang.” Journal of Archaeological Science 52 (2014).
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