Hiawatha Glacier, Glacial formation in Avannaata, Greenland.

Hiawatha Glacier is a glacier in northwest Greenland whose terminus reaches Inglefield Land, where its tongue once extended into Lake Alida near Foulk Fjord. Its surface is a white and pale-blue expanse of ridges, crevasses and uneven snow, with a flat frozen waterway along one side and a smooth white layer merging into the horizon under a clear blue sky.

Lauge Koch mapped Hiawatha Glacier in 1922 and noted its tongue reaching Lake Alida near Foulk Fjord. A 1952 publication recorded that the ice had been retreating since 1920. In 2018 airborne radar revealed a 31 km crater-like depression in the bedrock beneath the ice, and in 2022 argon-argon and uranium-lead dating of shocked zircon in melt rock placed the impact at 57.99 ± 0.54 million years ago, in the late Paleocene.

Lauge Koch, who mapped the glacier in 1922, named it after Hiawatha, a 16th-century Native American leader. The reference is a cartographic label only: no marker, structure or local tradition on the ice recalls the name.

The glacier lies in Inglefield Land, Avannaata, at 78.8°N, and has no road or settlement access; expeditions arrive by air and cross the ice sheet. Its tongue reaches Lake Alida near Foulk Fjord. Dating the crater required drilling nearly 1 km through the ice cap to reach melt rock.

Beneath the ice lies a huge impact crater left by a cosmic event roughly 58 million years ago. Radar images reveal the circular depression that otherwise remains invisible.