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Until recently, geologists believed that Greenland was a fortress of ice, mostly unmelted for millions of years. During the Cold War, a secret U.S. Army mission, at Camp Century in northwestern Greenland, drilled down through 4560 feet of ice on the frozen island—and then kept drilling to pull out a twelve-foot-long tube of soil and rock from below the ice. Then this icy sediment was lost in a freezer for decades. It was accidentally rediscovered in 2017, when Paul Bierman, a geoscientist in ¶¶Òõ̽̽’s Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources and a fellow in the Gund Institute for Environment, found that it contained not just sediment but also leaves and moss, remnants of an ice-free landscape, perhaps a boreal forest.

Bierman and his colleagues’ findings meant that a large portion of Greenland was an ice-free tundra landscape—perhaps covered by trees and roaming woolly mammoths—in the recent geologic past. This 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. Their study was published in the journal Science.

Read more about Paul Bierman’s work on the Greenland ice core.

Research of this type has contributed to ¶¶Òõ̽̽'s designation by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as an R1 institution, placing it in the top tier of research universities in the U.S.