AKIPRESS.COM - An enormous crater believed to have been caused by an asteroid that slammed into Earth 12,000 years ago has been found beneath the ice in Greenland, Sky News reports.

The 19-mile-wide impact had remained hidden under a half-mile-thick sheet of ice until it was exposed by a state-of-the-art radar system at the University of Kansas.

Located under the Hiawatha Glacier in remote northwest Greenland, the crater is thought to be the result of an iron asteroid about one kilometre in size that struck the island at the end of the Pleistocene.

The Pleistocene period - beginning about 2.6 million years ago and lasting until about 11,700 years ago - included the final ice age, during which huge glaciers covered the surface of the planet.

It took almost two decades to identify the crater, with most of the data needed collected between 1997 and 2014, and the findings have now been detailed in a new paper for the latest edition of Science Advance.