Greenland’s ancient landscape just emerged from beneath the ice—frozen in time for thousands of years. What scientists uncovered beneath the melting sheet wasn’t just rock, but a startling, well-preserved world that challenges everything experts thought about the island’s history.
Researchers studying ice cores from central Greenland have identified fossilized plant and insect material buried beneath roughly three kilometers of ice, evidence that the island’s interior was ice-free at least once within the past 1.1 million years. The discovery, published in 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the Greenland ice sheet has been less stable…
Scientists just pulled a 1.2-million-year-old ice core from Antarctica, and it’s already challenging what we know about Earth’s past. The ancient ice, buried deep beneath the continent’s frozen surface, contains trapped air bubbles that act as a time capsule of ancient atmospheres.
In January 2025, a team of scientists working in Antarctica recovered an ice core from 2,800 meters below the surface. The core contains a continuous climate record spanning 1.2 million years, including air bubbles that preserve the composition of the atmosphere at the time the ice formed. The samples predate the appearance of modern humans and extend significantly further back than any previous i…