As we focused our microscope on the soil sample for the first time, bits of organic material came into view: a tiny poppy seed, the compound eye of an insect, broken willow twigs and spikemoss spores. Dark-colored spheres produced by soil fungi dominated our view.
These were unmistakably the remains of an arctic tundra ecosystem– and proof that Greenland’s entire ice sheet disappeared more recently than people realize.
These tiny hints of past life came from a most unlikely place – a handful of soil that had been buried under 2 miles of ice below the summit of the Greenland ice sheet. Projections of future melting of the ice sheet are unambiguous: When the ice is gone at the summit, at least 90% of Greenland’s ice will have melted.
In 1993, drillers at the summit completed the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core, or GISP2, nicknamed the two-mile time machine. The seeds, twigs and spores we found came from a few inches of soil at the bottom of that core — soil that had been tucked away dry, untouched for three decades in a windowless Colorado storage facility.
