Carly Miller is a scientific writer reporting discoveries in geology, paleontology, archeology, and innovation and technology. She has covered discoveries in dinosaur roosting behavior, Maya human sacrifices, the life-saving super senses of honeybees, and volcanic eruptions.
The heart of Greenland has recently been green. A two-mile-deep ice core from the very center of Greenland ’s ice sheet in Summit , Greenland , produced a fossil assemblage containing an insect’s compound eye, an arctic poppy seed, willow wood matter, fungi, and spike moss. The discovery, made by scientists at the University of Vermont, supports a previously controversial hypothesis that Greenland has not been frozen solid for millions of years.
The evidence suggests that Greenland remained thawed for thousands of years in between phases of sustained freezing and ice accumulation, called glaciation periods. The discovery also implies that the two miles of ice covering Greenland today had to have accumulated over an estimated 416,000 years.
Fossil identification and soil analysis revealed that central Greenland hosted an open, arid, and green landscape at least once during the last 1.1 million years, most likely 416,000 years ago. The vegetation in the ice core samples necessitates a surface temperature range from 1 to 10 degrees Celsius— a tolerable, albeit cold environment at which the organisms could survive.
These datasets are the foundation of the global temperature reconstructions. The results from this study have underscored the utility of a critical database that is stored at the bottom of existng ice sheets, the basal ice-sediment interface, where fossils of the most recent warm period can refine our understanding of the cyclic ice ages and warming periods Earth has experienced in recent history, pre-dating human civilization.
Greenland Summit Pleistocene Ice Age
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