Word: eemian
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...best ways to try to figure out what will happen in the future is to ascertain what happened in the past. That's why we're in Greenland. Our team will be visiting the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, an international research team that has staked out a corner of the island's ice sheet and will, as the name suggests, drill. The ice in central Greenland is nearly 3 km thick, and as you drill down to the bottom, you can read the climatic history of the island as if you were counting tree rings going back...
...years ago, and they've helped form the bulk of our knowledge about past climate change. But the timeline is patchy, especially in Greenland, where we haven't been able to get a reliable ice core dating from 115,000 to 130,000 years ago. That's the Eemian period, and during those years the earth was some 5?C warmer than it is today. The NEEM scientists, whose ice cores should track back to that period, want to find out how the Greenland ice sheet reacted to the warming - with the hope that it will give us clues...