Melting ice on a small Greenland tundra pond (IMAGE)
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A large portion of Greenland melted about 416,000 years ago—perhaps a bit like the modern Greenland landscape shown in this photo—and became ice-free tundra, or boreal forest, a new study in the journal Science shows. The results help overturn a previous view that much of the Greenland ice sheet persisted for most of the last two and a half million years. Instead, moderate warming, from 424,000 to 374,000 years ago, led to dramatic melting. This finding indicates that the ice sheet on Greenland may be more sensitive to human-caused climate change than previously understood—and will be vulnerable to irreversible, rapid melting in coming centuries.
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Joshua Brown
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