Greenland Has Greener History Than Previously Thought

upstart writes:

Greenland has greener history than previously thought:

New analysis of samples collected from underneath Greenland's ice sheet reveal the Arctic island was much greener as recently as 416,000 years ago. The findings overturn previous views that Greenland's continental glacier, which covers about 80 percent of the 836,3000-square-mile land mass, has persisted for the last two and a half million years.

"We're discovering the ice sheet is much more sensitive to climate change than we previously thought," says Utah State University geoscientist Tammy Rittenour. "This is a foreboding wake-up call."

[...] "We had always assumed the ice sheet has remained about the same for nearly 2.5 million years," says Rittenour, professor in USU's Department of Geosciences. "But our investigation indicates it melted enough to allow the growth of moss, shrubs and buzzing insects during an interglacial period called Marine Isotope Stage 11, between 424,000 to 374,000 years ago."

The melting caused at least five feet of sea-level rise around the globe, she says. "Some of our model scenarios suggest sea levels up to 20 feet higher than today."

"It was an unusually long period of warming with moderately elevated levels of carbon dioxide-CO2-in the atmosphere," Rittenour says. "What's alarming about this finding is today's CO2 levels are 1.5 times higher."

Even if humans abruptly stopped activities that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, she says, "we'd still have inflated CO2 levels for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years to come."

That's an uneasy realization, she says, with current rates at which Greenland's ice sheet is thawing.

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