1. Corndilly Conspiracy
2. Roman Empire In Greenland
3. The Greenland Theory
4. Greenland Theory By David Chase Taylor
5. The Greenland Theory Suggests

Massive Crater Under Greenland

An artist's depiction of a large, iron-heavy meteor falling through Earth's atmosphere toward northwest Greenland. The discovery may reveal the cause of the mysterious disappearance of megafauna and early humans from North America. Picture: ScienceSource:Supplied

A massive iron meteorite smashed into Greenland as recently as 12,000 years ago, leaving a crater bigger than Paris that was recently discovered beneath the ice with sophisticated radar.

Excerpt: noun, a passage or segment taken from a longer work, such as a literary or musical composition, a document, or a film. 'the notion that Greenland is mostly covered ice and snow are both colossal hoaxes perpetrated onto the world in order for Rome to collectively deceive and survive her enemies of the day.' One theory suggested the migration of Norsemen across Greenland into North America. Another theory proposed the island of Atlantis as the origins of human life in the New World. Yet another idea proposed that the inhabitants had generated out of mud. They named Greenland to achieve quite the opposite, as they didn’t care if anyone was willing to colonize the iceberg in the freezing ocean. However, this theory is highly unlikely. In order to get to the bottom of this paradox, an investigation was conducted by National Geographic, in which the magazine went deep into different chronicles. The Vikings established two outposts in Greenland: one along the fjords of the southwest coast, known historically as the Eastern Settlement, where Gardar is located, and a smaller colony about 240. Directed by Ric Roman Waugh. With Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn. A family struggles for survival in the face of a cataclysmic natural disaster.

The crater is the first of its kind ever found on Greenland — or under any of the Earth’s ice sheets — and is among the 25 largest known on Earth, said the report in the journal Science Advances.

It is estimated the asteroid would likely have been made largely of iron, measuring about 1.5km across and weighing about 12 tons. The impact which created the 31 kilometres wide crater under the Hiawatha Glacier would have had significant ripple effects in the region, possible even globally, researchers said.

But its story is just beginning to be told.

The Hiawatha impact crater covered by the Greenland Ice Sheet and a tongue of ice that breaches the crater’s rim. Picture: NASASource:AFP

If confirmed, it could have major implications for the tale of humanity itself.

If confirmed, its dating could establish the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis as fact. It’s a somewhat controversial idea that a large impact in North America some 11,000 to 13,000 years ago during the last Ice Age caused massive wildfires across much of the Americas and Europe, as well as unsettling the weather conveyor belt of the North Atlantic current.

This in turn lead to the extinction of many megafauna mammals, such as the mammoth and mastodons — and possibly the early humans then occupying the Americas.

The hidden crater stretches nearly 20 miles (31km) wide. A prominent rim surrounds the depression. Picture: ScienceSource:Supplied

DEEP IMPACT

It would have been a spectacle seen across much of the Northern Hemisphere — a huge fireball many times brighter than the Sun, streaking across the sky.

Then it struck Greenland.

The resulting impact would have flashed across North America — sending molten projectiles spearing into forests over thousands of square kilometres and setting off enormous fires. And then the tsunamis and clouds of vaporised ice and bedrock circled the globe.

The location of the Hiawatha crater, hidden under Greenland's icecap. Image: Google EarthSource:Supplied

The impact would have been huge. But nowhere near as devastating as the dinosaur-killer strike that created the Chicxulub impact crater — some 200km wide — in Mexico some 66 million years ago.

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“There would have been debris projected into the atmosphere that would affect the climate and the potential for melting a lot of ice, so there could have been a sudden freshwater influx into the Nares Strait between Canada and Greenland that would have affected the ocean flow in that whole region,” said co-author John Paden, courtesy associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Kansas University.

The geomorphological and glaciological setting of Hiawatha Glacier, northwest Greenland. Source: ScienceSource:Supplied

“The evidence indicates that the impact probably happened after the Greenland Ice Sheet formed, but the research team is still working on the precise dating.”

That would suggest that the impact happened sometime before the end of the Pleistocene era some 11,700 years ago.

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“It’s likely quite young, geologically speaking,” says study co-author Joseph MacGregor, a glaciologist with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “It’s likely less than three million years old and possibly as young as 12,000 to 15,000 years old.”

Massive crater larger than Washington, D.C. found under Greenland's ice.https://t.co/gWTXV4CTGF Story by @voooos and the graphic by @cbickel27@sciencemagazine#ScienceVisualspic.twitter.com/jzIUlsHqqe

— Science Visuals (@ScienceVisuals) November 14, 2018

But does the Greenland crater clinch the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis?

“It’s a very speculative idea, but if this does turn out to be (the missing link), it would have had an outsize impact on human history,” McGregor says.

“We do not discuss it in the paper, but I think it is a possibility,” adds lead author Kurt Kjær, a glacial geologist and curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen. “This may generate a lot of discussion, and we need to find out. We won’t know until we have a proper date.”

UNEARTHING A CRATER

The discovery was initially made in the 2015 but an international team of researchers has been working to verify the findings ever since.

The initial finding was made with data from NASA’s Program for Arctic Regional Climate Assessment and Operation IceBridge.

More data was collected since then, using more advanced radar technology.

“So far, it has not been possible to date the crater directly, but its condition strongly suggests that it formed after ice began to cover GreenlandProfessor Kjaer says.

Researchers plan to try and recover material that melted from the bottom of the glacier to learn more about its timing and effects on life on Earth at the time.

Such a dating would vindicate Younger Dryas impact theorists.

Credit: Natural History Museum of Denmark/Cryospheric Sciences Lab/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Greenbelt, MD, USA An artist's depiction of the meteorite smashing into the Greenland ice sheet. The scientists behind the new research believe the initial impact created a hole 12 miles (20km) across, which rapidly collapsed to form the crater left behind.Source:Supplied

“I’d unequivocally predict that this crater is the same age as the Younger Dryas,” says James Kennett, a marine geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and one of the idea’s original supporters, told Science.

The climate chaos, the theory argues, would explain why the Clovis peoples’ settlements were abandoned and the megafauna vanished soon afterwards.

Not all agree.

Corndilly Conspiracy

“This is a hot potato,” impact crater expert at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, Jay Melosh told Science. “You’re aware you’re going to set off a firestorm?”

Lloyd Keigwin, a paleoclimatologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts says there is only one solution.

“Somebody’s got to go drill in there … That’s all there is to it.”

A shipload of visitors arrived in the fjord overnight, so Ingibjorg Gisladottir dressed like a Viking and headed out to work in the ruins scattered along the northern edge of this tiny farming village.

Qassiarsuk is tiny (population: 56), remote, and short on amenities (no store, public restrooms, or roads to the outside world), but some 3,000 visitors come here each year to see the remains of Brattahlid, the medieval farming village founded here by Erik the Red around the year 985.

When they arrive, Ms. Gisladottir, an employee of the museum, is there to greet them in an authentic hooded smock and not-so-authentic rubber boots. 'There were more visitors this year than last,' she says. 'People want to know what happened to the Norse.'

The Greenland Norse colonized North America 500 years before Christopher Columbus 'discovered' it, establishing farms in the sheltered fjords of southern Greenland, exploring Labrador and the Canadian Arctic, and setting up a short-lived outpost in Newfoundland.

But by 1450, they were gone, posing one of history's most intriguing mysteries: What happened to the Greenland Norse?

There are many theories: They were starved off by a cooling climate, wiped out by pirates or Inuit hunters, or perhaps blended into Inuit society as their own came unglued.

Now scientists are pretty sure they have the answer: They simply up and left.

'When the climate deteriorated, and their way of life became more difficult, they did what people have done throughout the ages: They looked for a more opportune place to live,' says Niels Lynnerup, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who studies the Norse.

Climate change was clearly driving the Norse, with their sheep- and cattle-farming traditions, to the edge of survival. With the onset of the Little Ice Age (from 1300 to 1850), conditions deteriorated across the Norse lands, particularly for people living on marginal farmland in Iceland, northern Norway, and Greenland.

Today, Greenland is warming up, with residents witnessing dramatic changes over the past five years. Winter sea ice, which the indigenous Inuit people in north Greenland traditionally relied on for sled dog transportation and seal hunting, has stopped forming reliably and robustly. Meanwhile, farmers in southerly communities like Qassiarsuk have enjoyed a markedly expanded growing area and season. Potatoes, previously confined to the far south, now grow as far north as the capital, Nuuk, 185 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Roman Empire In Greenland

A slowly cooling climate in 1300s

In the late 1300s, Norse Greenlanders likely experienced this process in reverse, their farms squeezed by advan­cing glaciers and truncated summers. It's no accident, anthropologists say, that the cold-adapted Inuit were spreading south in this period, their hunting territory eventually overlapping with the Norse.

Scholars have wondered why the Norse failed to adapt, dropping agriculture in favor of hunting and fishing, like the Inuit. Turns out, they did – up to a point. An analysis of the bones of Norse buried at Brattahlid and other Norse sites found that early settlers ate a diet consisting of 80 percent agricultural products and 20 percent seafood; from the 1300s, the proportions reversed.

But there were limits to their adaptations. Archaeological excavations indicate that the Norse never adopted the harpoons, kayaks, and fishing gear their Inuit neighbors used so successfully. And while there are plenty of seal bones in Norse dumps, virtually no fish bones have been recovered, leading some to argue that they never took advantage of the ample fish resources in the streams and fjords, even in times of famine.

Gisladottir, a native of Iceland, scoffs at the notion, pointing out that Norse in other lands ate fish in quantity. 'Of course they ate fish,' she says. 'One common way of preparing cod was to gut it, dry it, and then cook it in a pot for three or four hours and eat your porridge, bones and all.'

Fish or no fish, the Norse collapse was apparently in slow motion.

Eva Panagiotakopulu, a paleoecologist at the University of Edinburgh, has put together what happened to two of the Norse's more northerly farms with the clues left behind by the flies, lice, and beetles that lived in their sod-walled houses. Although located on the same fjord, she says, the farms met different ends.

Insect species can be highly specialized, allowing scientists to determine what livestock were present (certain lice live only on sheep, others only on goats), whether a building was occupied (some flies could only survive winter inside heated homes), and where food (in the form of decaying meat) was present. Together, their remains provide a record of events on the farms.

Two farms, two different fates

'In one, everything was going fine until the very end, and then they abandoned it, taking their food and supplies with them,' Ms. Panagiotakopulu says. 'In the other, it seems the farmers were trapped in their house during a very long winter, ate their livestock, then their dog, and then died in their beds,' prompting the flies to move from larder to bedroom.

The Greenland Theory

Still, society apparently carried on: Some­body later removed and presumably buried the farmers' bodies.

Other sites also show an orderly abandonment, not an apocalyptic end.

'You don't find bodies in and around the ruins,' says William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. 'People are being properly buried in church graveyards right up into the 15th century, so it doesn't look like they were wiped out by marauding Inuit or other big disruptions.'

Another indication of an orderly re­treat: no valuables such as crucifixes, chalices, or chandeliers at church sites, items often found in early medieval churches elsewhere in Scandinavia.

'Nothing has ever been found of any real value, just everyday items,' says forensic anthropologist Lynnerup. 'To me that indicates they left over an extended period.'

Greenland Theory By David Chase Taylor

Dr. Lynnerup's genetic studies of modern Inuit from across Greenland has put another theory to rest: that the Inuit absorbed the Norse. Their mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mothers only) show no European admixture. Archaeological evidence at medieval Inuit sites backs this up, suggesting contact between the two peoples was limited to minor barter.

The Greenland Theory Suggests

'During the same time period, a lot of Norse settlements in Iceland and northern Norway were being abandoned, but nobody writes big books about that,' Lynnerup says. 'I'm not sure that the Norse saw Greenland as being very different from the fjords they came from in Norway, and leaving it was no more stressful than abandoning a hamlet in Norway.' His theory: In the 1300s and 1400s, Greenland's youths voted with their feet, leaving until the colony could no longer support itself. The last few left.

'I imagine this old Norse man standing in his sodden, graying field with a couple of scrawny cattle and saying to his son, 'One day, this will all be yours,' ' he says. 'And the son gets on the next ship to Reykjavik.'

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