Apparently the frozen piece of soil that was collected in Greenland during the Cold War by a secret military operation (the Iceworm project ) hid another mystery: fossil plants that could be a million years old.
According to the experts, who publish their results in the journal PNAS, they are so well preserved that “it seems that they died yesterday.
Iceworm aimed to build an underground US base that would conceal hundreds of nuclear warheads (no less than 600), within attack range towards the Soviet Union. However, after that initial liftoff in 1966, in which a polar science station was established as a cover for the real plan, the base was abandoned and the ice core was left behind in a freezer in Denmark until it was rediscovered in 2017.
The team of scientists at the University of Vermont who analyzed the samples of these ice cores from the 1960s excavated more than 1.5 kilometers deep, suggests, after the discovery of fossils of plants, twigs and leaves, that this area was free of ice in the last million years. During this ice-free period, the land mass, roughly the size of Alaska, was covered in vegetation, including moss and perhaps trees.
History captured under the ice
Finding twigs and leaves instead of sand and rocks therefore suggests that Greenland could have counted a boreal forest in the recent geological past , where today we can find only ice, since most of Greenland is covered by an ice sheet that It spans 1.7 million square kilometers, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
The discovery revealed that the ice sheet is more fragile to climate change than previously thought, putting all coastal cities at risk if it melted again, and the study authors warn that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could cause a rise of more than 6 meters in sea level worldwide.
“Greenland may seem far away but it can melt quickly, pouring enough into the oceans for New York, Miami and Dhaka to submerge in the water,” explains geoscientist Paul Bierman, co-author of the work.
And, according to this study , we have to take into account that most of Greenland’s ice disappeared relatively recently , which does not bode well for the stability of the current ice sheet in response to climate change. caused by human beings.
“This is not a twenty-generation problem. This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years, “ continues Bierman.
Understanding the Greenland ice sheet in the past is critical to predicting how it will respond to global warming in the future and how quickly it will melt.
Referencia: Andrew J. Christ el al., “A multimillion-year-old record of Greenland vegetation and glacial history preserved in sediment beneath 1.4 km of ice at Camp Century,” PNAS (2021). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2021442118
