THAW THREAT
Long-lost ice core provides evidence of a massive melt during a previous period of warming
Greenland’s ice faces greater melting peril
If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt away, global sea levels would rise an average of six metres, putting almost every coastal city in the world at risk of major flooding.
Now, a study of an ice core forgotten for more than 50 years has found this is exactly what happened during a recent warm period that was alarmingly similar to the one we’re headed towards due to human-caused climate change.
The core was originally extracted in 1966 from Camp Century, a Cold War military base. The base masqueraded as a science station to provide cover for Project Iceworm – a secret US Army programme to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites beneath the Greenland ice sheet. The military mission failed, but the science team did complete important research, including drilling a 1,400m-deep ice core.
The core was kept in an army freezer before being moved to New York’s University of Buffalo in the 1970s, and then to the University of Copenhagen in the 1990s, before eventually being rediscovered by Danish researchers in 2017.
For the last year, an international team of scientists have been analysing the plant fossils and sediment found in the core to determine its composition and age. They concluded that most, if not all, of Greenland melted at least once during the past million years and was covered in a blanket of vegetation including moss, lichen, and perhaps even spruce and fir trees.
“Ice sheets typically pulverise and destroy everything in their path,” said team member Dr Andrew Christ, of the University of Vermont. “But what we discovered was delicate plant structures – perfectly preserved. They’re fossils, but they look like they died yesterday. It’s a time capsule of what used to live on Greenland that we wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.”
“Our study shows that Greenland is much more sensitive to natural climate warming than we used to think – and we already know that humanity’s outof-control warming of the planet hugely exceeds the natural rate,” said Christ.