Environment

Going Green: Greenland really was green

by ryan | July 6, 2007 at 12:39 pm

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It feels like everything is going green these days, from Hummers which run on hydrogen to the advancement of solar power, and now Greenland is going green...ok, I admit it's going green in a different way but it still has the same panache. In a strange twist of irony, scientists have concluded that Greenland used to be really be green. Or does it mean that the name of the country was passed on for half a million years.

Ice-covered Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests in a climate much like that of Sweden and eastern Canada today.An international team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from the bottom of an ice core that indicates the presence of pine, yew and alder trees as well as insects.

The researchers, led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, say the findings are the first direct proof that there was forest in southern Greenland.

Included were genetic traces of butterflies, moths, flies and beetles, they report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

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Jim Lacey (not verified)

at 13:47 on May 19th, 2009

Just because Greenland may have been green some million years ago is hardly an arguement defending man's carbon emission as not impacting the climate. The two aren't necessarily related.

Who will positively say today what turned Greenland's southern forests to pure ice today and who dares equates that reason as evidence that the same thing is responsible for climate change today?

Shall all of science simply say, "Hey, it's cyclical what is happening, forget it, let's keep motoring on and emitting carbon into the atmosphere and not worry about it."

I would much rather err on the side of concern and investigation and the consensus of 2000 of our leading scientists than simply blow off the current changes as cyclical and leave it at that.