{"id":223923,"date":"2025-10-24T05:45:40","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/a-volcano-or-a-meteorite-new-evidence-sheds-light-on-puzzling-discovery-in-greenlands-ice-sheet"},"modified":"2025-10-24T05:45:40","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:45:40","slug":"a-volcano-or-a-meteorite-new-evidence-sheds-light-on-puzzling-discovery-in-greenlands-ice-sheet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/a-volcano-or-a-meteorite-new-evidence-sheds-light-on-puzzling-discovery-in-greenlands-ice-sheet","title":{"rendered":"A volcano or a meteorite? New evidence sheds light on puzzling discovery in Greenland\u2019s ice sheet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-volcano-or-a-meteorite-new-evidence-sheds-light-on-puzzling-discovery-in-greenlands-ice-sheet2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Buried deep in Greenland\u2019s ice sheet lies a puzzling chemical signature that has sparked intense scientific debate. A sharp spike in platinum concentrations, discovered in an ice core (a cylinder of ice drilled out of ice sheets and glaciers) and dated to around 12,800 years ago, has provided support for a hypothesis that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/full\/10.1073\/pnas.1303924110\" target=\"_blank\">Earth was struck<\/a> by an exotic meteorite or comet at that time.<\/p>\n<p>Our <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosone\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pone.0331811\" target=\"_blank\">new research<\/a> published in <i>PLOS One<\/i> offers a much more mundane explanation: this mystery <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/platinum\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">platinum<\/a> signature may have originated from a volcanic fissure eruption in Iceland, not space.<\/p>\n<p>The timing matters. The platinum spike occurs near the beginning of our planet\u2019s last great cold period, the Younger Dryas Event. This lasted from about 12,870 to 11,700 years ago and saw temperatures plummet across the northern hemisphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Buried deep in Greenland\u2019s ice sheet lies a puzzling chemical signature that has sparked intense scientific debate. A sharp spike in platinum concentrations, discovered in an ice core (a cylinder of ice drilled out of ice sheets and glaciers) and dated to around 12,800 years ago, has provided support for a hypothesis that Earth was [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,19,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroid-comet-impacts","category-chemistry","category-existential-risks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}