00:01Buried under a mile of ice, it's never been seen by human eyes.
00:07But using ice-penetrating radar, scientists have discovered a giant canyon
00:11carved into Greenland's bedrock.
00:15More than 400 miles long and up to a half-mile deep,
00:18shown here is the dark brown groove in the center of the island.
00:22The canyon is thought to predate Greenland's massive ice sheet.
00:28The hidden feature was discovered by a team led by the University of Bristol,
00:33using radar data from a number of airborne campaigns from the United Kingdom and Germany,
00:39and a NASA mission called Operation Ice Bridge,
00:42which surveys this region with a range of different instruments every year
00:46to monitor changes in the Greenland ice sheet.
00:51From the interior of Greenland, the canyon snakes around
00:55up to the fjord of the Peterman Glacier on the northern coast,
00:59and researchers suspect it may play a major role
01:02in transporting meltwater below the ice into the Arctic Ocean.
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