Happy New Year 2024 (and sorry for the forum being offline some hours) /DM
Across Baffin Bay to the west of Greenland is Baffin Island. This is the largest of the islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and ranked the fifth largest in the world; it is almost as big as Texas (Greenland is the largest). Baffin Island has its own ice cap as well as satellite ice caps to the main body of ice. It is these satellite ice caps that attracted the attention of researchers.The plants were dated with carbon-14 dating techniques to a time period 44,000 years ago that was in the depths of the last 100,000-year-long ice age. (3) At that time, the ice was growing and temperatures in the Arctic were 25 to 35 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the warmest time of our current interglacial era - the time between ice ages. The average temperature across the globe was 9 to 14 degrees colder than today. (4)To find temperatures similar to today's, we would have to go back nearly 120,000 years ago to the previous warmup between glacial periods, so it is virtually certain from these findings that the plants that these researchers found have not seen daylight in over 100,000 years. One of the amazing things this work reports is that some of the mosses at the 145 sites surveyed began to regrow once the ice melted away. (5)Since the global thermal maximum temperature that occurred after the end of the last ice age about 5,000 years ago, Baffin Island cooled nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit, but since the 1960s, this area has warmed nearly 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and the snow line has increased in altitude over 2,700 feet (half a mile). (6) This research definitively puts to rest the talking point that Greenland was warmer than today at any time in the past 100,000 years. The warming has also taken place entirely in the last 50 years, and during this entire 5,000-year-long period the natural cycles have been cooling, not warming.
