Greenland was not always covered with ice.
Joshua Brown / UVM
If you look through the back of your freezer, you can find all kinds of goodies that you’ve probably forgotten about, but probably nothing quite as surprising as a discovery made in the back of a freezer at the University of Copenhagen.
A 4.5 meter tube of ice and soil from Greenland, recovered in 1966 by a US military team that had drilled more than a mile into the ice, was first analyzed in 2019 – and there was much more than just sand and dirt in the samples.
In a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the international team of researchers describes the discovery of “perfectly preserved” twigs and leaves trapped in their recovered ice cores. The existence of these plants implies that there was once vegetation in that spot that is now buried under ice, showing that a good portion of Greenland must have been ice-free for the past million years.
Scientist Andrew Christ reported that the samples are like a Greenland time capsule for the ice. “Ice sheets usually pulverize and destroy everything in their path,” he said, “but what we found was delicate plant structures. They’re fossils, but they look like they died yesterday.”
The implications of the discovery could be huge for climate change studies, as analysis of the Greenland ice sheet could help scientists predict how it will behave when temperatures rise and the ice melts due to human activity. It can also help them estimate how long it will take for the ice sheet to fully melt, affecting sea levels worldwide.
In addition, the discovery suggests that Greenland could be more vulnerable to human-induced climate change than we initially thought, given evidence that most of the ice sheet has melted away at least once in history – and that was without the help of humans greenhouse gases. and emissions.
Now that the levels are higher, the ice can melt faster and with more extreme results. The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to raise sea levels by 20 feet worldwide, which would have serious consequences for the coastal population if it melts.
Chief scientist Paul Bierman was emphatic about the need to immediately address Greenland’s ice problem. “This is not a 20-generation problem,” he said. “This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years.”