An immense crater in northwestern Greenland, buried under a thick sheet of ice and first spotted in 2015, is much older than previously suspected - formed by a meteorite impact 58 million years ago, rather than 13,000 years ago as had been proposed.
Scientists said on Wednesday they used two different dating methods on sand and rock left over from the impact to determine when the crater - about 19 miles wide - was formed. They found that the meteorite - roughly one to 1.25 miles in diameter - struck Greenland about 8 million years after a larger asteroid impact at Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula wiped out the dinosaurs.
The meteorite released millions of times more energy than an atomic bomb, leaving a crater big enough to swallow the city of Washington. As bad as it was, it did not approach the scale of calamity wrought by the asteroid - estimated at 7.5 miles wide - that struck 66 million years ago, erasing three quarters of Earth's species and initiating a global climate catastrophe.
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