Paleodata From Greenland Show Ice Dome 50 Miles Broad And 1,600 Feet High Melted Completely w/i Last 10,000 Years

When the researchers first arrived at their field camp at Prudhoe Dome, atop the Greenland ice sheet, they felt they had been swallowed by a monster. The mountain of ice in northwest Greenland was more than 50 miles wide and 1,600 feet tall. The temperature at its summit was well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists’ experiment there — an unprecedented effort to extract bedrock from deep beneath the ice sheet — was routinely disrupted by howling winds and blizzards so dense they blocked the sun. It was hard to imagine that this formidable, frozen expanse could ever disappear.

But the rocks they uncovered on that 2023 expedition contain chemical signatures showing that Prudhoe Dome had completely melted within the past 10,000 years — and it might soon suffer the same fate amid modern climate change. The results published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience hold a warning for a warming planet, lead author Caleb Walcott-George said. The study suggests that large portions of Greenland were ice-free in Earth’s recent past, when global temperatures weren’t much higher than they are now. If the same melting occurred today, it would raise average sea levels anywhere from 7.5 inches to 2.4 feet.

Present-day melting may not precisely emulate what happened in the past, the researchers acknowledged. The cause of modern climate change — pollution primarily from burning fossil fuels — is distinct from the slight wobbles in Earth’s orbit that triggered warming thousands of years ago. But researchers said their findings could be used to improve the computer models used to simulate how the ice sheet responds to warming. “Understanding how the ice sheet evolved in the past … allows us to make better predictions about our future,” said Walcott-George, a glacial geologist at the University of Kentucky.

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The GreenDrill team had hoped it would find that Prudhoe Dome hadn’t melted since the last interglacial — a geological period more than 100,000 years ago, when global temperatures were slightly warmer than they are today. But the luminescence measurements suggested that the sediments had been buried for only about 7,100 years. This meant the ice atop Prudhoe Dome had disappeared amid conditions similar to the current climate, when the Arctic was about 3 to 5 degrees warmer than it was in the 19th century. The discovery bolsters a growing body of evidence suggesting that Greenland’s ice sheet is extremely susceptible to temperature swings, Briner said.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/01/05/greenland-rocks-melting-ice/