The "green land" was deprived of ice
Greenland a million years ago ... forgotten fossils reveal new secrets
Snow covers 85% of the island.
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A new study shows that the vast Arctic island of Greenland, in the Danish language, was deprived of ice about a million years ago.
This conclusion was reached thanks to the discovery of plant fossils in ice specimens forgotten for decades that were accidentally found in a refrigerator in Copenhagen, as Dorothy D. Jensen, co-author of the study published in the Journal of the National Academy of Science »Scientific.
"In the ice core samples, we were able to identify very well-preserved algae, branches and whole leaves, which are plants found on the coast in southern Greenland, but also in the tundra and the boreal forest," said a professor of climatology at the University of Copenhagen.
These ice core samples were taken in 1966 from Camp Century, a secret US base built under the cover of a Climate Research Center, where 600 nuclear warheads were stored during the Cold War but were subsequently removed.
These samples were pulled from a depth of more than a kilometer in the ice, and were then archived in Copenhagen in 1994 without any documentation.
"We discovered it when we changed the refrigerator, and nobody was interested in these 22 samples before," said Dahl-Jensen.
"We were able to determine that the ice core samples remained intact and covered Greenland for about a million years," she added, but the island was previously free of ice, according to the climate scientist.
The study concluded that the Great Greenland ice sheet "melted and formed at least once in the past 1.1 million years."
Greenland, which covers 85% of its surface area and is the largest island in the world with an area of two million square kilometers, lies on the front line of ice melt in the Arctic, an area that is warming two to four times faster than the rest of the planet, according to scientists.
• The largest island in the world, with an area of two million square kilometers.
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