Ancient plant life found in Greenland

NUUK, Greenland, Aug. 17 (UPI) -- An international team of scientists has found possible ancient plant matter in Greenland's ice.

Investigators with the North Greenland Ice Core Project have found what looks like pine needles, tree bark or blades of grass in reddish clumps of core samples from about 10,400 feet beneath the surface.

The scientists surmise the material dates back long before the last ice age -- during a period called the Pleistocene epoch -- buried Greenland under permanent glacial ice.

If confirmed, it would be the first organic material to be recovered from a deep ice core drilling project, and its condition suggests the Greenland Ice Sheet "formed very fast," said NGRIP project leader Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute.

"There is a big possibility that this material is several million years old -- from a time when trees covered Greenland," she said.

The ice cores containing the reddish material also revealed a high content of trapped gas, which the team members said should help determine what the area's climate history was like on an annual basis during the past 123,000 years.