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Earth is hiding massive secrets beneath its surface and scientists are only just beginning to uncover them. In this collection, we explore two of the most mysterious geological discoveries of recent years: a gigantic crater hidden deep under Greenland’s ice and a strange hole growing beneath North America. These puzzling formations defy easy explanation, leaving researchers scrambling to understand what created them, how fast they’re changing, and what they mean for the future of our planet. Animation is created by Bright Side.
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Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/
Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV
Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz
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Our Social Media:
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en
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https://www.shutterstock.com
https://www.eastnews.ru
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For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me
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This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.
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00:00There's nothing around, just the eternal, endless whiteness of Greenland snow and cold winds blowing into your face.
00:09Nothing hints at the impending catastrophe.
00:12You take another step and freeze in horror.
00:15An abyss is spreading at your feet, bottomless and dark.
00:20If you had made a bigger step, it would have swallowed you.
00:24That infamous Greenland's hole.
00:27It happened in the middle of the 2010s.
00:30A group of geologists were scanning the surface of Greenland's Hiawatha Glacier using radar when they spotted something very, very strange.
00:39It was a giant pit, more than 980 feet deep and almost 20 miles wide.
00:45That's big enough to fit inside Washington, D.C. or Paris.
00:50After staring at their radars for quite a while and scratching their heads, researchers decided to find out what could have made such a huge hole.
00:58Could it have been good ol' erosion?
01:01A raging volcano?
01:02An asteroid impact?
01:04A giant sandworm?
01:06Ugh.
01:07I might have gone a bit overboard with this worm idea, but you never know with these ancient glaciers.
01:13Anyway, in our case, one mystery seemed to lead to another, which had been puzzling scientists for decades.
01:19And to solve both of them, scientists needed something super common, but at the same time, very important.
01:25Quartz.
01:26One of the most abundant materials in Earth's crust.
01:30But before we dig deeper into this topic, let's make a small detour and talk about a pretty bizarre phenomenon called the Younger Dryas Event.
01:38To see what it was like, we need to go deep into the past, as far back as 12,900 to 11,600 years ago.
01:49During that period, the planet became much colder, especially in Europe and North America.
01:54Now, let's talk a bit more about that weird climate change in the Northern Hemisphere.
02:00There are a few theories.
02:02One that involves a change in currents in the Atlantic Ocean.
02:05Another speaks about something large kicking tons of dust into the air and effectively blocking sunlight.
02:11The two most popular, and likely, hypotheses mention a volcanic eruption and an asteroid impact.
02:19Indeed, there was a volcanic eruption on the territory of modern-day Germany at around the right time.
02:25But there's also a probability that a space object struck the planet during this period, too.
02:32And now, let's get back to the hole scientists found in Greenland.
02:36When NASA's IceBridge program and Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute discovered it,
02:42it seemed they had finally found a reason for the Younger Dryas event.
02:46But was it really an asteroid that created that impressive pit and caused temperatures to drop all over the Northern Hemisphere?
02:54To test this theory, the researchers needed quartz.
02:58The thing is, in its pure form, quartz has a very simple structure.
03:02It's made from interlocking silicon oxygen tetrahedra.
03:06Efficient and so pretty.
03:09Just look at these six-sided prismatic crystals.
03:12Since its structure is so simple and the components are so common,
03:15you can find quartz almost in any rock on the planet.
03:19At one point, magic happens.
03:22Larger rocks erode away, pushing out tiny bits of quartz sand.
03:26The scientists exploring the mysterious pit gathered the quartz sand that had been washed out from underneath a glacier.
03:33It was like looking at the rocks at the very bottom of the hole without having to actually get all the way down there.
03:40Very handy.
03:42So, while examining the material, they discovered quartz grains with the telltale signs of terrible catastrophe.
03:48They had PDFs all over them.
03:53Uh, no.
03:54I'm not talking about the document format.
03:57PDFs stand for planar deformation features, and they look like lines etched into the crystal surface.
04:03These lines are a sign that you're holding shocked quartz.
04:08It forms under immense pressure when the internal crystals are pushed out of alignment.
04:13But the most exciting thing here is that shocked quartz only appears under the influence of powerful forces,
04:21like massive impacts or terrifying explosions.
04:25In other words, finding this poor shocked quartz under the Hiawatha Glacier
04:29could be much-needed proof that the hole was an enormous impact crater
04:33that formed when something equally enormous crash-landed there.
04:37Based on the size of the crater, this space object probably was a bit more than a mile across,
04:45which is twice the height of the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai.
04:49A meteorite that big would have looked three times as bright as the sun when traveling across the sky,
04:54and it would have hit Earth with an immense force.
04:58The impact would have been so great, it'd have vaporized rock and thrown debris for hundreds of miles away.
05:05The sky would have filled with dust, it would have dimmed the sun,
05:09and led to a temperature drop all over the planet.
05:12And guess what?
05:13The last part about decreasing temperatures got the researchers super excited.
05:18Because it opened up a possibility that the impact could have been connected to the Younger Dryas event.
05:25To prove this idea, scientists decided to use quartz again.
05:29They examined it more closely, trying to date the impact.
05:34Well, they were in for an even greater shock.
05:37The Hiawatha crater turned out to be not 12,000, but 58 million years old.
05:44On the other hand, the researchers were disappointed that they hadn't been able to confirm their theory.
05:50The crater couldn't explain the Younger Dryas cold snap.
05:53But on the other hand, it was still an amazing discovery.
05:57Now, get ready for one final twist to this story.
06:01And it revolves around quartz again.
06:05Other scientists have recently discovered more deposits of shocked quartz all over what is now the eastern USA.
06:11It was hiding in sediment layers dating to just before the Younger Dryas.
06:16Interestingly, there aren't any craters around those sites whatsoever.
06:20But quartz can't lie.
06:22It provides evidence of a powerful explosion.
06:26It makes scientists think that their impact hypothesis might still be true.
06:30But instead of a collision, it could be an airburst.
06:34A massive comet could have broken up while entering Earth's atmosphere around 12,000 years ago.
06:40And the fragments could have exploded before reaching the ground.
06:44It would have caused catastrophic mass burning throughout the North American continent.
06:48And messed with the climate so much that the Younger Dryas would have been triggered.
06:54Well, I guess we need to wait a bit longer for scientists to find some further proof of this hypothesis.
07:00But it doesn't mean we don't have any more curious phenomena to explore in Greenland.
07:05Take these fascinating holes.
07:07They sure are kind of smaller than the monster we were talking about.
07:11They're called moulins.
07:13And they carry surface meltwater all the way down to the base of the Greenland ice sheet.
07:19And they have prepared some surprises for us, too.
07:22Apparently, they're way larger than we previously thought.
07:26That's what a recent study based on observation and first-hand exploration claims.
07:30Even more interesting, this high volume might influence the stability of the ginormous ice sheet in question,
07:38as well as the speed at which it's sliding towards the sea.
07:43Researchers think that increased water depth and pressure inside moulins might lubricate the base of the ice sheet,
07:50making it move faster.
07:52You know, the way an ice cube slides more easily on a thin film of melted water.
07:57Until recently, we knew too little about the real size of moulins and how much water they can hold.
08:03But now, we know that moulins can be giant.
08:07The team made two trips to the Greenland ice sheet in 2018 and 2019.
08:13And during each of them, they used ropes and climbing equipment to drop around 330 feet into two separate moulins,
08:21almost touching the water's surface.
08:23Those who did it described the experience as intimidating.
08:28Picture this.
08:29Your back is over the edge.
08:31All you see is bluish ice going down and blurring into blackness.
08:36And the only thing you hear is occasional sounds of crashing ice.
08:41It must be extremely unnerving.
08:43The floor is lava.
08:49Haha, just kidding.
08:50But honestly, it's kind of falling apart.
08:53You might not feel it yet, but a huge part of North America has already lost 37 miles worth of rock from its foundation.
09:01And no, this isn't about earthquakes or giant sinkholes.
09:05It's about the continent losing pieces of the very thing that keeps the ground from wobbling around like a bad carnival ride.
09:13A team of researchers has just dropped a geological bombshell.
09:17Part of North America's ground is thinning out like a very sad, very slow ice cream drip.
09:23How do they know?
09:24They basically gave Earth a high-tech full-body MRI and created 3D maps showing how rocks once considered indestructible are now melting away into the planet's guts,
09:36like an upside-down cheese pizza inside an oven.
09:39But to really understand this mess, you first have to meet my old friends, cratons.
09:45Cratons are like the roots of the continents.
09:47They're thick, tough, and ancient.
09:50We're talking billions of years old.
09:53These bad boys survived meteor impacts, supervolcanoes, and even the tectonic movement of plates.
10:00If the plates got into fistfights, for example, you can bet we would see mountain ranges being born.
10:05If they got a divorce, drifting apart from each other, then a whole new ocean would be born.
10:13All of these things leave scars on the surface of Earth, but the cratons seem to always remain unfazed, like the cockroaches of geology.
10:22And since a craton can basically get punched in the face and feel nothing, scientists always assumed these things were nearly indestructible.
10:30But then, a group of researchers took their fancy machines to the test and realized that, wait, the cratons are falling apart?
10:39How?
10:41Enter the Farallon Plate, a really ancient tectonic plate that started to slide under North America's major plate over 100 million years ago.
10:50This is a pretty normal process, actually.
10:54It's called subduction, and it's how Earth recycles rocks and keeps itself from overheating.
11:00This subduction thing has been happening for so long that, by now, the Farallon is almost 400 miles away from the craton,
11:08sitting pretty chill at the lower mantle, weirdly close to the outer core of our planet.
11:13But the Farallon has been causing trouble, like that one roommate who moved out but keeps leaving weird stuff in the fridge.
11:21You see, as it sinks, it tugs on the bottom of North America's foundation, stretching it out and causing pieces to fall off into the deep mantle.
11:31And if that wasn't enough drama, the sinking Farallon has also leaked water and carbon dioxide into the surrounding rocks,
11:38making the craton even softer and easier to shred apart.
11:42Thanks, Farallon.
11:43Very cool of you.
11:46By studying hundreds of earthquakes across thousands of monitoring stations, scientists have confirmed the story.
11:52Big chunks of continental material are dripping downward, thinning the craton by as much as 37 miles.
11:59That's more missing rocks than can fit into a milk carton.
12:03Sounds dramatic, right?
12:04But don't worry.
12:06This is happening at a snail's pace.
12:08It'll take millions of years for anything noticeable to happen.
12:11Your great-great-great-great-great-few grandkids from the distant future might still be standing on solid ground.
12:19But don't get too comfy.
12:21This thing may not be an urgent problem, but there's another type of sinking that's happening faster than you can say,
12:27Help?
12:28Here's the thing.
12:29By 2050, at least 32 major cities in the U.S., including New York, Baltimore, and Charleston, could be partially underwater.
12:39And guess what?
12:40This one is mostly our fault.
12:42Scientists noticed that, since 2007, some cities have been sinking into the ground between 0.04 and 0.08 inches every year.
12:53Charleston, in South Carolina, is pulling ahead in the worst way possible, sinking 0.15 inches annually.
13:00Sure, these numbers sound tiny and a bit ridiculous.
13:04But Charleston is barely 9 feet above sea level, and a little sinking goes a long way when the ocean is breathing down your neck.
13:12On really bad flood days, people there have to abandon their cars and basically swim home.
13:18This whole phenomenon is called land subsidence.
13:22And when you mix sinking land with rising sea levels, you get a disaster cocktail of flooded streets, salty farmland, ghost forests, and a lot of very cranky homeowners.
13:34And it doesn't stop with just homes.
13:37Infrastructure like bridges, roads, airports, and power plants.
13:41All things we rely on daily are also at risk of serious damage.
13:46Flooded electrical grids and sunken highways could cause billions more in economic losses and create major safety hazards for communities.
13:56Now, let's be fair.
13:58Not everything is humanity's fault.
14:00Some of this trouble dates all the way back to the Ice Age.
14:04About 12,000 years ago, massive ice sheets covered the northern U.S.
14:08They were heavy.
14:10Like, seriously heavy.
14:11The weight pushed the land down, and when the ice melted, the ground didn't just pop back up like a trampoline.
14:18Instead, it started playing a weird game of geological seesaw.
14:23The places that were squished started rising, and the places that weren't got pulled down.
14:28This whole process, called glacial isostatic adjustment, try to say that three times fast.
14:34But, of course, humans found a way to make it worse.
14:38Groundwater extraction is a major culprit.
14:41Think of it like pulling the stuff out of the mattress.
14:44After a while, the whole thing just sags.
14:47In places like California's Central Valley, the land is dropping by up to 8 inches a year because we keep pumping out water during droughts.
14:55In cities like New York, the problem isn't just water.
15:00Skyscrapers themselves are making it worse.
15:03Yep, turns out if you stack millions of tons of concrete and steel onto soft ground, it tends to flatten.
15:11And in case you're wondering, the total mass of New York City's buildings is around 1.68 trillion pounds.
15:18That's about the same as 3.5 million statues of liberty piled up.
15:24With so much weight concentrated over a relatively small area, the underlying soils have no choice but to compress over time.
15:32And if you thought it couldn't get messier, think again.
15:36We've been building dams, which stop rivers from delivering fresh sediment to coastal areas.
15:42That sediment is kind of like Mother Nature's way of fluffing the ground back up.
15:47Without it, coastal lands are compacting like an old sponge.
15:52Plus, when wetlands are drained for agriculture or construction, the peaty soil dries out and collapses.
15:59Honestly, it's like the ground just can't catch a break.
16:04Scientists also noticed that the areas that used to be lush wetlands are now among the fastest sinking spots in the country, especially along the Gulf Coast.
16:14Louisiana, for example, is losing about a football field of land because of this mix of subsidence and rising seas.
16:23So what's the endgame here for us regular people who just want to live above sea level?
16:28Well, it's not looking great.
16:31Ghost forests, which are basically drowned woodlands, are popping up.
16:35Farmland is turning salty and unusable.
16:38And even sunny-day flooding, where streets flood without any rain, is becoming a thing.
16:43Yikes!
16:45Meanwhile, over on the West Coast, California is not exactly winning either.
16:50San Francisco and Los Angeles are both sinking, which means that rising sea levels could hit them twice as hard and twice as fast.
16:58In some places, like the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the ground has been sinking so fast, people over there might as well live like moles.
17:07So, is America turning into the next Atlantis?
17:10Probably not next week, but without serious action, like cutting back on groundwater pumping and planning smarter cities,
17:18at least 500,000 people are in serious danger.
17:21And the housing damage could easily rack up a jaw-dropping $109 billion by 2050.
17:30In the end, while North America isn't about to sink like a poorly made souffle, it's definitely showing some cracks in the crust.
17:38So maybe let's ease up on groundwater pumping, rethink how and where we build, and invest a little more in keeping our feet dry.
17:46After all, if the floor really does become lava someday, we're gonna wish we had at least fixed the leaks first.
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