Researchers in Greenland have discovered the largest canyon on earth, hidden underneath the massive island's ice sheet, which remains frozen year round.
The canyon measures 2,600 feet deep and 6 miles wide, a scale that measures favorably against the famous Grand Canyon in Arizona, according to an NBC News report.
At that depth, it's not the deepest canyon in the world; that distinction belongs to Colca Canyon in Peru, which drops 13,650 feet into the Earth. Greenland's canyon. However, it is by far the longest. The previous longest was the 308-mile-long (496 km) Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in China. This canyon is at least 460 miles long, though because its underground researchers believe it could easily be larger.
The glacier stretches from Summit, the highest point in Greenland to Petermann Glacier on the Northwest coast. That is to say, it stretches at least that far.
"It may actually go farther south," lead study author Jonathan Bamber a geographer at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
At those dimensions, the canyon's massiveness is hard to fully fathom, and would be impossible to scope from any one vantage point, even if it weren't covered in ice that is two miles thick. At six miles wide and 460 miles long, the canyon's total area could be approximated to 2,760 square miles; Delaware, as a point of comparison, is 2,489 square miles.
The glacier was discovered by accident when scientists were mapping the bedrock underneath the ice using radar and stumbled across it. Estimates project that the canyon formed four million years ago, and was partially uncovered 100,000 years ago, according to BBC News.
"You think that everything that could be known about the land surface is known, but its not," Bamber said. "There's still so much to learn about the planet."
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