Today, nearly 98% of Greenland is covered in ice — but new research suggests it was virtually ice-free less than a million years ago.
Over the years, opinion has shifted about whether Greenland has been continuously covered by ice since the start of the Pleistocene epoch, roughly 2.7 million years ago. But a new fossil
discovery, described in a study published Aug. 5 in the journal PNAS, "provides the first direct evidence that the center — not just the edges — of Greenland's ice sheet melted away in the recent geological past," according to a statement from the University of Vermont.,
"Our new data is the strongest confirmation yet that the ice in the center of the island vanished and was replaced by a tundra ecosystem," study lead author Paul Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont, told Live Science.
