Photo taken by Ansgar Walk
By Jo Nova
The Experts thought Greenland’s ice has been there for the whole Pleistoscene era, or the last 2.6 million years. It was just another useless consensus, stultifying science — feeding the myth that the climate was perfect until Big Coal screwed it up.
Map adapted from Westoff et al 2022
Finally, 30 years after the famous GISP ice core was hauled out of the Greenland summit, someone has bothered to study the dirt at the bottom and found poppy seeds, willow twigs and insects there, where they were not supposed to be. They discovered a vibrant tundra ecosystem where there was supposed to be an ice-cap. The obvious conclusion is that cavemen didn’t cause it, and that there must be some huge other natural forces at work that we have no clue about. Our climate models didn’t predict this, because CO2 was low then and clearly, the models are hopelessly incomplete. We are babes in the wood on the third rock from the sun.
The captive science PR writers don’t tell us that CO2 might be irrelevant compared to the big mystery forces we don’t understand. Instead they tell us that this means that the Greenland icesheet is more fragile than we realized and could melt again (send us your money!)
No matter what we discover it’s always worse than we thought:
Fossils From The Heart of Greenland Reveal a Greater Threat of Rising Seas
Scientists have discovered plant and insect remains under a two-mile-deep (three km) ice core extracted from the center of the island, providing the clearest proof yet that nearly all of this vast territory was green within the past million years, when atmospheric carbon levels were much lower than today.
Their research, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates even greater potential for global sea level rise due to human-caused climate than previously thought.
The stranglehold of government-funded-science meant it took 30 years to do half an hour of research:
The ice core, named GISP2, was drilled in 1993 and although its rock and ice had been studied extensively, nobody had thought to look for fossils in the ’till,’ or the mixed sediment at the bottom.
That’s because until recently the idea that Greenland was ice-free in the recent geologic past seemed too far-fetched.
“Literally, we saw the fossils within the first hour, maybe half hour, of working on it,” lead author Paul Bierman, a professor of environmental science at the University of Vermont, told AFP.
To their amazement, researchers found within this three-inch-layer soil willow wood, spores from spikemoss, fungi, the compound eye of an insect, and a poppy seed – together suggesting a vibrant tundra ecosystem.
The GISP2 site is about as high and central as you can get in Greenland. If the ice was gone there, it was probably gone everywhere. But the same experts who want us to spend $1,000 billion dollars every year, thought that Greenland was an impenetrable ice-fortress.
In 2016 some scientists figured out the bedrock under the GISP core was only 1.1 million years old, which was considered “controversial” since the ice was supposed to have been solid for 2.6 million years. In 2019 Bierman et al were shocked to find that Camp Century (in the far north) had melted totally around 416,000 years ago. (That frozen soil was first dug up in the 1960s, so it sat in a Danish freezer for fifty years.) Another ice core at DYE 3 contained the DNA of spruce trees. Obviously Greenland melts, we just don’t know why, when or how often. The researchers best guess is that the ice melted at the summit probably more than 250,000 years ago and probably less than 1.1 million. Maybe it was 416,000 years ago too.
If the whole ice cap melted, the world’s oceans presumably rose the 7 odd meters they are theoretically supposed to rise. There is no denying that this would be seriously inconvenient today, especially for coastal real estate, but it’s also true to say corals reefs didn’t vanish, there was no mass extinction or runaway Greenhouse apocalypse either. The Earth didn’t turn into Venus.
The important message here should be that natural climate change could smack us over the head, but we don’t understand the big forces at all. If Greenland’s ice-cap melts again, we need a few decades to prepare. So we need climate models that can actually predict things, not ones that suit politicians and strangle real research for decades.
If Greenland melted 416,000 years ago, why didn’t it melt during the other three warm spikes below? (Graph from the EPICA ice core in Antarctica).
Epica ice core Antarctica. NOAA
Photos of the spores, wood and insect eyes that are not supposed to live at the summit of Greenland during an ice age period.
GISP2 till and macrofossils found in it: (A) Photo of the angular-clast-rich till section of the GISP2 subglacial core, taken 1994, up core to left (Credit: T. Gow, supplied by D. Meese). (B) Overview of sediment, mostly quartz and fossils. (C) Wood fragment. (D) Vertical orientation typical of GISP2 wood. (E) Wood at higher magnification showing simple pits in lateral vessel wall (1) and distinct simple perforation plate (2), along with the helical thickening typical of GISP2 wood. (F) Bud scale of Salix (willow). (G) Sclerotium of the soil fungus C. geophilum* (H) Insect eye, possibly from a fly*. (I) S. rupestris megaspore. (J) Seed of Papaver sect. Scapiflora. The asterisk shows macrofossil types also found in Camp Century sediment by ref. 5. Wood fragment images are same specimen.
REFERENCE
Bierman, et al (2024) Plant, insect, and fungi fossils under the center of Greenland’s ice sheet are evidence of ice-free times, PNAS, August 5, 2024, 121 (33) e2407465121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2407465121
Christ et al (2021) A multimillion-year-old record of Greenland vegetation and glacial history preserved in sediment beneath 1.4 km of ice at Camp Century, PNAS, March 15, 2021, 118 (13) e2021442118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.202144211