Green Greenland Was Good
Climatologists worry about
Greenland melting, but
plants thrived there before
It’s a puzzle students learn early in school: Greenland is icy, and Iceland is green. As the story goes, naming it “Greenland” was a marketing strategy. Erik the Red, a Viking explorer, wanted to attract settlers by giving Greenland an attractive name. Other explorers to Iceland first encountered ice, not realizing from their first look that much of the island was green and good for settlement.
Notwithstanding the history of the names, fossils show that Greenland actually was green, all the way into its interior! And yet climate scientists today worry that if Greenland’s current ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise and the earth will be in the throes of catastrophic global warming.
Our story on 16 March 2021 reported the discovery of plant materials a mile down under the ice about 60 miles from the coast of Greenland. These “delicate plant structures—perfectly preserved” looked like they had “died yesterday” said one scientist from the University of Vermont whose team studied an ice core drilled in 1966 that had been forgotten. They were shocked by that find. Now, more plant material has been found two miles down, and farther from the coast. This indicates that most of the continent of Greenland was ice free in the past. Remarkably, somehow Earth survived that period of global warming long before Erik the Red came ashore.
Fossils show Greenland was once ice-free – and could be again (5 Aug 2024, New Scientist). Reporter Madeleine Cuff summarizes the latest findings.
Fossilised plants and insects extracted from beneath the centre of Greenland provide “smoking gun” evidence that the ice sheet has completely collapsed in the past – and could do so again.
The findings, taken from a sediment core drilled 30 years ago, reveal that the island was once an ice-free Arctic tundra complete with insects and plant life.
The fossils were found deep in the GISP2 ice core drilled in 1993. They included “an insect eye, fungus spores, bud scales of a young willow tree and an Arctic poppy seed.” This conclusively proves that the interior of Greenland had no ice when those organisms thrived.
From Bad to Worse for Greenland—and Humanity (5 Aug 2024, University of Vermont). Here is the press release from the scientific team. For whatever reason, press agent Joshua Brown builds his story on climate alarmism. Finding that the Greenland ice sheet can melt, because it has in the past, is “worse” news for “humanity” somehow. “Poppy seeds and willow twigs found under two miles of ice confirm Greenland ice sheet melted in recent past, showing increased risk of sea-level catastrophe in a warmer future,” he says. Cue doomsday music.
With the climate alarmists pacified with the commercial, let us look at the data. The GISP2 (“Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2”) core had been kept frozen at the University of Colorado. With the U Vermont team having found plant material in the 1966 Camp Century core, they began to wonder about this core drilled two miles deep in the interior of Greenland. Paul Bierman had been with the team in 2019 that examined the Camp Century core that was closer to Greenland’s coast.
“Once we made the discovery at Camp Century, we thought, ‘Hey, what’s at the bottom of GISP2?’” said Bierman, a professor in UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and fellow in the Gund Institute for Environment. Though the ice and rock in that core had been studied extensively, “no one’s looked at the 3 inches of till to see if it’s soil and if it contains plant or insect remains,” he said. So he and his colleagues requested a sample from the bottom of the GISP2 core held at the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado.
Lo and behold, they found more plant and animal remains. Andrew Christ and Halley Mastro took a careful look. Here’s what they saw:
“It was amazing,” she said. Under the microscope, what had looked like no more than specks floating on the surface of the melted core sample, was, in fact, a window into a tundra landscape. Working with Dorothy Peteet, an expert on macrofossils at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-author on the new study, Mastro was able to identify spores from spikemoss, the bud scale of a young willow, the compound eye of an insect, “and then we found Arctic poppy, just one seed of that,” she said. “That is a tiny flower that’s really good at adapting to the cold.”
But not that good. “It lets us know that Greenland’s ice melted and there was soil,” said Mastro, “because poppies don’t grow on top of miles of ice.”
This means that a thriving ecosystem existed in the deep interior of Greenland, lasting long enough for soil to form. The article shows a photo of “willow wood, insect parts, fungi, and a poppy seed” found in the bottom of the ice core. “These fossils are beautiful,” remarked Bierman before launching into part of his sermon on climate change.
How long ago did Greenland melt? The scientists have opinions, but were not there with a stopwatch.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 5th, confirms that Greenland’s ice melted and the island greened during a prior warm period likely within the last million years—suggesting that the giant ice sheet is more fragile than scientists had realized until the last few years.
If the ice covering the center of the island was melted, then most of the rest of it had to be melted too. “And probably for many thousands of years,” Bierman said, enough time for soil to form and an ecosystem to take root.
He’s confabulating. We know from eyewitness observations of Surtsey that ecosystems on new islands can become established within decades, not thousands of years (19 May 2015). Mt. St. Helens gave another example of the resilience of nature to catastrophic change (6 Aug 2012).
Ancient poppy seeds and willow wood offer clues to the Greenland ice sheet’s last meltdown and a glimpse into a warmer future (5 Aug 2022, The Conversation). This piece by Bierman and Mastro, principal investigators in the study, includes maps of where the ice cores were found and and photos of the fossils with their modern counterparts. An embedded video includes historical footage of the ice core being pulled up from below the ice pack. They claim the fossils are 400,000 years old—far less than previous estimates that were over a million years. Their focus is on the vulnerability of the ice pack to complete melting in our time, and the damage that a 23-foot sea level rise would cause.
As a balance to that claim, however, is a book review in Science on August 1 that describes the long history of trying to establish what “mean sea level” (MSL) is. Human judgment is unavoidable, says author von Hardenberg, who says, “The drive to standardize sea level is ultimately an effort to understand, control, and shape marine and terrestrial spaces.” Despite its importance to aviators and climatologists, putting a single value on “mean sea level” is a subject of debate, as anyone observing the waves and shifting tides on a beach can attest.
Plant, insect, and fungi fossils under the center of Greenland’s ice sheet are evidence of ice-free times (Bierman et al., 5 Aug 2024, PNAS). The scientific paper gives more details about the “excellent preservation” of the fossils.
The presence of poppy, spike-moss, fungal sclerotia, woody tissue, and insect parts in the GISP2 till shows that tundra vegetation once covered central Greenland, mandating that the island was largely ice-free.
Micrographs in the paper show details of an insect’s compound eye (possibly a fly), a bud scale from a willow, and a sclerotium of a soil fungus. In the Supplementary Information, the authors state that the microscopic structure was still visible in some of the wood samples. The paper and press release do not state whether the original biomaterial was preserved, but it appears so from the photographs.
One thing is clear from this story: humans with their SUVs and coal mines did not cause Greenland’s ice to melt at that time. It’s interesting that nobody looked at the bottom of the GISP2 core till now. That’s because they never expected to find plant remains there.
Materialist scientists postulate several ice ages with “interglacials” between them. This ice-free episode, they say, had to be the final interglacial because the exceptional preservation of the fossils indicates “minimal fossil transport” of the material. To creationists, this sounds like the ice cover was recent. Flood geology models need only one Ice Age: the one after the Flood, which came on rapidly. Nothing in the paper except for their biased choice of radiometric methods requires long ages. Eyeball evidence coupled with common sense suggests that these organisms, similar to modern ones, were buried under the ice recently before the ice moved very far, and before the organic matter had become mineralized. The paper does not clearly state whether the fossil material is original, but the photos show pristine plant and animal parts that, like the ones at Camp Century, appear to have been “buried yesterday.” Everything looks young: thousands of years old at most, not millions. We like to point out that belief in Deep Time is not the solution to evolutionary problems. Deep Time is the problem.
Materialists want the public to believe in two extremes: a mythical Snowball Earth (see 22 July 2024), and a future Hothouse Earth after human-caused global warming reaches a tipping point. The evidence from Greenland, however, shows that a warm and dry Greenland did not cause a global catastrophe. They fail to recognize intrinsic feedback mechanisms that our planet’s Creator provided to keep the earth resilient against perturbations and to prevent catastrophic failures of the biosphere. Since “he formed it to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18), and since foresight is a mark of intelligent design, it’s only logical that a wise Creator knows how to keep his handiwork functioning and to preserve the life he designed.