Read the full story in the Washington Post.
As soon as Andrew Christ peered at the sample inside his microscope, he knew he had found something special. Bits of tiny twigs, moss and leaves were mixed with sediments extracted from deep beneath a Cold War military facility on the Greenland ice sheet. It was as if he’d opened a time capsule from the deep past — revealing proof that a tundra ecosystem once flourished where there is now nearly a mile of ice.
But it wasn’t until years later, after Christ and his colleagues figured out the age of those samples, that he fully grasped the importance of the discovery. New analysis suggests that the material comes from a period about 416,000 years ago, when Earth’s temperature wasn’t much higher than it is now. The results mean that Greenland once lost a tremendous amount of ice under climate conditions very much like the ones humans have created and are currently living in. They imply that coastlines could soon be submerged under several feet of sea level rise — unless people manage to stop emitting greenhouse gases and reverse the dangerous warming of the world.
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