North Greenland is known for being 'the land of the midnight sun and dog sledding' as a polar desert with massive icebergs. But that wasn't always the case – 2 million years ago, it was 'a forested ecosystem unlike any now found on Earth.'
North Greenland is known for being"the land of the midnight sun and dog sledding" as a polar desert with massive icebergs. But that wasn't always the case – 2 million years ago, it was"a forested ecosystem unlike any now found on Earth." published in Nature this week reveal just how much the icy landscape has changed.
"A new chapter spanning one million extra years of history has finally been opened and for the first time we can look directly at the DNA of a past ecosystem that far back in time," one of the researchers, Eske Willerslev from the University of Cambridge, said in a ."DNA can degrade quickly but we've shown that under the right circumstances, we can now go back further in time than anyone could have dared imagine." Willerslev, along with Kurt H. Kjær from the University of Copenhagen, uncovered 41 samples, each only a few millionths of a millimeter long, but with an invaluable amount of information.
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