Beneath Greenland's Ice Lies a Giant Canyon

A valley far longer than the Grand Canyon has been discovered beneath a mile-thick sheet of ice in Greenland.

A Nasa airborne mission to the island has revealed the previously unknown giant canyon which has the characteristics of a winding river, at least 460 miles long.

This means it is longer than the Grand Canyon in Arizona, in the US, which is 277 miles long.

The Greenland Canyon, which is as deep as 2,600 feet in some places, is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.

"One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped," said Jonathan Bamber, the lead author of the study and professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol.

"Our research shows there's still a lot left to discover."

The scientists used thousands of miles of radar data, collected by Nasa and researchers from the UK and Germany over several decades, to piece together the landscape lying beneath the ice sheet.

They found that the canyon stretched from almost the centre of the island to beneath the Petermann Glacier fjord in northern Greenland.

Evidence suggests that as much as four million years ago water flowed in the canyon and that it was part of a major river system.

Much of the data was collected by Nasa's Operation Icebridge campaign, an airborne study of polar ice, which is expected to return to Greenland next March.

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