The Anonymous
Bag On My Head
Jars of dirt taken from lost in a freezer for decades could hold crucial new information about climate change and sea level rise.
A study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists says that plant fossils found in a sample of dirt collected from a mile beneath the ice in the mid-1960s suggest that the world’s pre-human climate was at one point warm enough to completely melt the Greenland ice sheet.
The dirt researchers inspected is a sediment sample from the bottom of an ice core, retrieved by drilling down into the ice sheet that covers the majority of Greenland. The sample was originally recovered from the first ice core of Greenland ever taken during a 1966 expedition to a military base called Camp Century.
The discovery of these fossils definitively suggests that Greenland was once ice-free enough to provide a home for a variety of plants.
The Greenland ice sheet disappeared in a climate system that didn’t have any human influence.