Greenland was not always covered with ice.
Joshua Brown / UVM
If you look through the back of your freezer, you can find all sorts of goodies that you would probably forget, but probably nothing as surprising as a discovery on the back of a freezer at the University of Copenhagen.
A 15-foot tube of ice and dirt from Greenland, recovered in 1966 by a U.S. military team that drilled more than a mile into the ice, was first analyzed in 2019 – and there were many more if only 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 described the discovery of ‘perfectly preserved’ twigs and leaves locked inside their extracted iron cores. The existence of these plants implies that there was once vegetation on the site that is now buried by ice, which shows that a decent part of Greenland must have been ice-free for the past million years.
Scientist Andrew Christ reports that the samples are like a time capsule from Greenland before the ice. “Ice sheets usually wear out and destroy everything in their path,” he said, “but what we discovered were fine plant structures. These are fossils, but they look like they died yesterday.”
The implications of the discovery could be huge for studies on climate change, as analyzing Greenland’s ice sheet could help scientists predict how it will behave as temperatures rise and the ice melts due to human activity. It can also help them estimate how long the ice will last before it melts completely, affecting sea levels worldwide.
In addition, the discovery suggests that Greenland may be more sensitive to human-caused climate change than we thought, given evidence that most of the ice sheet has melted away at least once in history – and this was without the help of people greenhouse gases and emissions.
Now that the levels are higher, the ice can melt faster and with more extreme results. Greenland’s ice sheet contains enough water to raise world sea level by 20 feet, which will have serious consequences for the coastal population if it melts.
Chief scientist Paul Bierman emphasized the need to address Greenland’s ice problem immediately. “It’s not a 20-generation problem,” he said. “This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years.”