Paul VoosenGlobal warming is accelerating the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, which locks up enough water to raise sea levels by 7 meters.
In 2021, U.S. researchers will go to the frozen expanse to pinpoint the last time it disappeared. The 5-year, $7 million campaign, awarded last month by the National Science Foundation, will mark the first large U.S.
ice drilling program in Greenland in more than 25 years. Unlike past projects, the target is not the climate records held in the ice, but the rocks below, which contain radioactive clocks that show when they were last exposed to air. “The whole bedrock is an archive,” says Joerg Schaefer, a geochemist at Columbia University and co-leader of the project, called GreenDrill. “It’s just a.