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March 17, 2021 01:25 am

Scientists Stunned To Discover Plants Beneath Mile-Deep Greenland Ice

KindMind shares a report from ScienceDaily: In 1966, US Army scientists drilled down through nearly a mile of ice in northwestern Greenland -- and pulled up a fifteen-foot-long tube of dirt from the bottom. Then this frozen sediment was lost in a freezer for decades. It was accidentally rediscovered in 2017. In 2019, University of Vermont scientist Andrew Christ looked at it through his microscope -- and couldn't believe what he was seeing: twigs and leaves instead of just sand and rock. That suggested that the ice was gone in the recent geologic past -- and that a vegetated landscape, perhaps a boreal forest, stood where a mile-deep ice sheet as big as Alaska stands today. Over the last year, Christ and an international team of scientists -- led by Paul Bierman at UVM, Joerg Schaefer at Columbia University and Dorthe Dahl-Jensen at the University of Copenhagen -- have studied these one-of-a-kind fossil plants and sediment from the bottom of Greenland. Their results show that most, or all, of Greenland must have been ice-free within the last million years, perhaps even the last few hundred-thousand years. "Ice sheets typically pulverize and destroy everything in their path," says Christ, "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." The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

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