Icy Greenland was greener than scientists once thought — and more vulnerable to climate change

(CN) — The story of how an island about 80% covered by an ice sheet came to be called Greenland is usually told as an early attempt at false advertising. But it turns out the center of Greenland was full of green tundra not so long ago, indicating the ice sheet might be less resistant to climate change than scientists realized.

Using an ice core sample from the center of Greenland taken in 1993, researchers found soil that contained willow wood, fungi, a poppy seed, and the legs and compound eye of an insect.

Those signs of life, especially the presence of rock spikemoss megaspores — which is only found on sandy gravel or rocks today in the area's greener southern edges — show that Greenland’s now 2-mile-thick ice sheet melted away between 1 million and 400,000 years ago.

During that time, that region of the Arctic island had a mean July temperature between 33.8 F and 50 F, the researchers write in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The ice on the island dissipated for long enough for soil to form and an ecosystem to take root, wrote Paul Bierman, a geologist and professor at the Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont, in a press release accompanying the study. Bierman co-led the study with UVM graduate student Halley Mastro and nine other researchers.

Scientists once believed the island's ice was millions of years old and thus resistant to climate change.

But Greenland’s ice sheet “is vulnerable, fragile and capable of disappearing,” Bierman said. And, it’s a “great piece of evidence that the world has changed in the past, and it will again.”

While the natural processes that melted the ice before are infinitesimally slow, climate change caused by greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions from humans has hyper-charged the phenomenon.

Bierman said: "Greenland has really long arms that reach around the planet. It might seem like an obscure place high in the Arctic, but every bit of ice that melts becomes water that flows into the ocean, raising sea level. If all of Greenland’s ice were to melt, raising sea level more than 20 feet, hundreds of millions of people would see their homes, farms and places of work slip under rising seas.

“Look at Boston, New York, Miami, Mumbai or pick your coastal city around the world, and add 20 plus
feet of sea level,” said Bierman. “It goes underwater. Don't buy a beach house.”

While this study won't reveal anything about the next decade, it could inform the next century as humans try to live with and solve the problems of climate change, he said.

Richard Alley, a leading climate scientist at Penn State who reviewed the research, said: “This new study confirms and extends that a lot of sea-level rise occurred at a time when causes of warming were not especially extreme, providing a warning of what damages we might cause if we continue to warm the climate.”

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