On November 14, 2018, science journalist Paul Voosen reported in the elite journal Science on the discovery of a possible impact crater under Greenland’s ice sheet. The next day on Twitter he described his effort to break the story after learning about it more than a year earlier. But the scientists had chosen to remain silent until they got a paper through peer review and published in the AAAS journal Science Advances, which has very strict embargo rules.
A visualization of the Hiawatha crater beneath the northwestern Greenland ice cap derived from satellite imagery and radar. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio,
NASA/GSFC
Supporters of the controversial “Clovis Comet” hypothesis were primed to claim the Hiawatha Crater as their smoking gun.