Here’s anoth­er canary in the coal mine arti­cle for human pow­ered cli­mate change. The story has every­thing from Cold War nuclear mis­siles to left­overs for­got­ten in freez­ers and cool nick­names like Project Iceworm. It turns out that just hop­ing nat­ur­al sys­tems are infi­nite and resilient isn’t a reli­able civ­i­liza­tion plan.

The dis­cov­ery helps con­firm a new and trou­bling under­stand­ing that the Greenland ice has melt­ed off entire­ly dur­ing recent warm peri­ods in Earth’s his­to­ry — peri­ods like the one we are now cre­at­ing with human-caused cli­mate change.

Understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet in the past is crit­i­cal for pre­dict­ing how it will respond to cli­mate warm­ing in the future and how quick­ly it will melt. Since some twen­ty feet of sea-level rise is tied up in Greenland’s ice, every coastal city in the world is at risk.

Science Daily

You know what’s even sad­der to think about it? If some­one had been pay­ing atten­tion to those ice cores over 50 years ago, it still would not have mat­tered. They could have released a sci­en­tif­ic study about these fos­silized leaves at the first Earth Day in 1970 and we would still be in the same boil­ing pot we are now. People think in decades and life­times not mil­len­nia. The trend seems to be speed­ing up instead of slow­ing down. When we careen off the cliff, here’s to hop­ing for wide open water to splash down in.

Photo Credit: William Bossen