Crater In Greenland Not Associated With Younger Dryas Event

There is significant evidence to support the theory that a meteor strike caused the Younger Dryas event. 

This event turned a warming period after the Last Glacial Maximum into a thousand year return to an ice age that destroyed the few hundred year old Clovis culture, and led to mass megafauna extinction in North America, and delaying by three thousand year the Neolithic Revolution that eventually emerged in the Fertile Crescent. The oldest known stone temple in the world, in what is now Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, appears to have images carved in stone that memorialize this impact.

Four years ago, scientists thought a crater in Greenland, found under its rapidly melting glacier, would be the smoking gun that would definitively prove that theory. 

But it turns out that it dated to only eight million years after an extra-terrestrial impact in the Gulf of Mexico led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals that replaced them. The genus Homo would not diverge from chimpanzees and bonobos for another 50 million years after the crater just found in Greenland formed.

So, the search for the impact site of the meteor that may have caused the Younger Dryas event continues.

In 2018, an international team of scientists announced a startling discovery: Buried beneath the thick ice of the Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland is an impact crater 31 kilometers wide—not as big as the crater from the dinosaur-killing impact 66 million years ago, but perhaps still big enough to mess with the climate. Scientists were especially excited by hints in the crater and the surrounding ice that the Hiawatha strike was recent—perhaps within the past 100,000 years, when humans might have been around to witness it.

But now, using dates gleaned from tiny mineral crystals in rocks shocked by the impact, the same team says the strike is much, much older. The researchers say it occurred 58 million years ago, a warm time when vast forests covered Greenland—and humanity was not yet even a glimmer in evolution’s eye.

From Science citing this March 9, 2022 paper in Science Advances.