HIDDEN CANYON

The world’s longest canyon lies buried below two miles of ice in Greenland. Researchers discovered the unknown geographical feature by examining data collected from airplanes equipped with ice-penetrating radar. The radar revealed a massive gash in the island’s bedrock that is twice as long and twice as wide as the Grand Canyon, though only half as deep.(CLICK BELOW TO READ MORE)
“It’s not every decade, it’s not every five decades that you discover something quite as substantial and extensive as a feature like this, so it was a big surprise for us,” geographer Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol in the U.K. tells NPR​.org. The canyon appears to funnel melt-water from Greenland’s massive ice sheet into the sea, which may explain why there are no lakes beneath Greenland’s ice, as there are beneath Antarctica’s. The runoff may also influence how quickly sea levels rise as climate change causes ice to melt on the world’s largest island. Researchers believe rivers carved out the canyon some 4 million years ago. “You think that everything that could be known about the land surface is known, but it’s not,” Bamber says. “There’s still so much to learn about the planet.”