A recently discovered ice core taken from beneath Greenland's ice sheet decades ago has revealed that a large part of the country was ice-free around 400,000 years ago.
The study overturns previous assumptions that most of Greenland's ice sheet has been frozen for millions of years, the authors said. Instead, moderate, natural warming led to large-scale melting and sea level rise of more than 4.6 feet, according to the report"When you look at what nature did in the past, as geoscientists, that's our best clue to the future," said Paul Bierman, a scientist at the University of Vermont and a lead author of the study.
At the time, there wasn't the technology to understand the sediment very well and so it was lost in a freezer for decades, Bierman said. Then, in 2017, it was rediscovered in Denmark. The scientists still needed to figure out how long ago the plants had been growing. To establish the time frame, samples were passed to a team at Utah State University, which uses luminescence technology – a technique which allows them to date the last time the sediment was exposed to daylight.
The potential implications for sea level rise are enormous, Tammy Rittenour, a professor from Utah State University and study co-author said in a statement. "We are looking at meters of sea level rise, probably tens of meters. And then look at the elevation of New York City, Boston, Miami and Amsterdam. Look at India and Africa – most global population centers are near sea level."
Andrew Shepherd, head of geography and environmental sciences at Northumbria University in the UK who was not involved in the study, said the research was important because it "increases our confidence in predictions of how much melting we can expect in a warmer climate."
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