Hidden under a mile of ice in Greenland until recently discovered is a massive canyon comparable in some ways to the Grand Canyon, according to a NASA news release.
The canyon is a meandering river channel is at least 460 miles, longer than the Grand Canyon, and is 2,600 feet deep at some points, putting it on par with some the Grand Canyon's sections.
The discovery was made during an airborne science mission and the study on the data was published Thursday in Science.
"One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped," said lead author Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the U.K. "Our research shows there's still a lot left to discover."
The research team pieced together the landscape hidden beneath the mile of ice using data from a NASA's operation IceBridge from 2009-2012, in addition with several decades of data from the U.K. and Germany. Operation IceBridge featured primarily a Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth, which is capable of seeing through massive amounts of ice to determine its thickness and what lies beneath.
"Two things helped lead to this discovery," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It was the enormous amount of data collected by IceBridge and the work of combining it with other datasets into a Greenland-wide compilation of all existing data that makes this feature appear in front of our eyes."
Operation IceBridge will return to Greenland in March 2014 to gather more data on land and sea ice in the Arctic. The researchers believe the canyon is vital to transporting sub-glacial meltwater from Greenland's interior to the ocean.
"It is quite remarkable that a channel the size of the Grand Canyon is discovered in the 21st century below the Greenland ice sheet," said Studinger. "It shows how little we still know about the bedrock below large continental ice sheets."
