Trench construction in 1960 at Camp Century, an Arctic U.S. military scientific research base in Greenland. (Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, via Courthouse News)
PARIS (AFP) The ice sheet atop Greenland which holds enough frozen water to swamp coastal cities worldwide has melted to the ground at least once in the last million years despite CO2 levels far lower than today, stunned scientists have reported.
The surprise discovery of plant fossils in soil samples extracted in the 1960s by U.S. army engineers from beneath over a mile of ice is smoking-gun proof that Greenland three times the size of Texas was covered with lichen, moss and perhaps trees in the not-so-distant past.
And what better housewarming gift for a space enthusiast than the tree that started it all. The Malus pumila Rosaceae, or Flower of Kent, now growing heartily on McNeill s property, is one of a handful of scions, or cuttings, growing around New Zealand. The original is still standing at Woolsthorpe Manor, in Lincolnshire, in the United Kingdom, where Newton escaped a bubonic plague outbreak for what historians call his Year of Wonders, owing to his contributions to optics, physics and calculus. It was later propagated and planted in the grounds of the England’s National Physical Laboratory.
Robyn Edie/Stuff
MSU Project Headed To The Moon In 2023 1075zoofm.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from 1075zoofm.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Kevin Krajick
In 1966, U.S. Army scientists drilled through nearly a mile of ice in northwestern Greenland and pulled up a 15-foot-long core of sediment from the bottom. The sample, abandoned and largely forgotten in a series of freezers for decades, was accidentally rediscovered in 2017. Researchers who later examined it were stunned to find it contained not just the usual sand and rock found under glacial ice, but well-preserved remains of twigs and leaves the first discovery of onetime plant life under this apparently long-frozen part of the world.
In a new study published this week in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from a dozen institutions say the discovery indicates that most or all of Greenland’s ice melted one or more times within about the last million years, allowing vegetation or even forests to grow. The finding strongly bolsters a 2016 study of bedrock retrieved from the bottom of an even deeper core that indicated the ice had la
MSU Project Headed To The Moon In 2023
A lunar lander called Blue Ghost will touch down on the Earth s Moon in 2023, carrying with it a Montana State University experiment on how outer space radiation affects computers. Marshall Swearingen of MSU News reported that RadPC has already been tested in Earth orbit and on the International Space Station. NASA had earlier accepted the project as part of a payload headed toward the lunar surface, but a schedule this past week gives the Bozeman, Montana, project team some definite deadlines to put together the finishing touches.
Brock LaMeres, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor, said, We were doing prototyping and testing, and then overnight this announcement changed everything. It s exciting because all of a sudden we re scheduling meetings with upper-level NASA people to lay out the schedule for everything that has to happen before launch.