Valley wider than Grand Canyon discovered beneath Ice Sheet in Greenland

Scientists in last week of August 2013 unveiled that they have discovered a vast canyon under the ice sheet of Greenland, which was previously unknown. The latest discovered canyon stretches in an area of over 750 kilometers and it up to 800 meters deep.  

The canyon was discovered by the scientists using an air borne radar data, which was collected over a period of several decades to piece together the landscape beneath the ice. The hidden valley is longer than the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

The canyon spreads from the centre of Greenland up to the northern coastline. Scientists claim that before formation of the ice sheet it would have contained a river gushing into the Arctic Ocean, which was buried due to encroaching ice about 3.5 million years ago.

The findings were reveled in journal Science.

About Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Although it is a part of the continent of North America, but politically and culturally it has been associated with Europe (specifically Norway and later Denmark) for more than a millennium.

Greenland is a home of one of the Earth’s two major ice sheets, the other one lies in Antarctica. A three-dimensional picture of the bedrock of Greenland was developed by the glaciologists until 2001, but the resolution of the same was quite poor.

About Grand Canyon of Arizona
The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in the Colorado Plateau of the United States in the State of Arizona. The Grand Canyon is 446 km long and up to 29 km wide and attains a depth of over 1800 meters.