Seeds, twigs, and insect parts found under two miles of ice confirm Greenland's ice sheet melted in the recent past, the first direct evidence that the center -- not just the edges -- of the two-mile-deep ice melted away in the recent geological past.
Seeds, twigs and insect parts in ice core stun scientists and confirm that center of ice sheet melted in recent pastSeeds, twigs, and insect parts found under two miles of ice confirm Greenland's ice sheet melted in the recent past, the first direct evidence that the center -- not just the edges -- of the two-mile-deep ice melted away in the recent geological past.
If the ice covering the center of the island was melted, then most of the rest of it had to be melted too."And probably for many thousands of years," Bierman said, enough time for soil to form and an ecosystem to take root. "Look at Boston, New York, Miami, Mumbai or pick your coastal city around the world, and add twenty plus feet of sea level," said Bierman."It goes underwater. Don't buy a beach house."In 2016, Joerg Schaefer at Columbia University and colleagues tested rock from the bottom of the same 1993 ice core and published a then-controversial study suggesting that the current Greenland ice sheet could be no more than 1.
Now this new study in PNAS, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, provides confirmation that the 2016"fragile Greenland" hypothesis is right. And it deepens the reasons for concern, showing that the island was warm enough, for long enough, that an entire tundra ecosystem, perhaps with stunted trees, established itself where today ice is two miles deep.
But not that good."It lets us know that Greenland's ice melted and there was soil," said Mastro,"because poppies don't grow on top of miles of ice."Paul R. Bierman, Halley M. Mastro, Dorothy M. Peteet, Lee B. Corbett, Eric J. Steig, Chris T. Halsted, Marc M. Caffee, Alan J. Hidy, Greg Balco, Ole Bennike, Barry Rock.A temperature reconstruction from ice cores of the past 1,000 years reveals that today's warming in central-north Greenland is surprisingly pronounced.
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