The spectacular striated ice wall at Fearn Lake
I wish there were some captions on those pics. Looks like I'll hafta go scouting around for additional info on Antarctica. BTW, what's your best guess when Antarctica was last ice free???
Just a suspicion, but I suspect there may be some interesting artifacts found "under" the ice.
I was just thinking about that...!
In the summer of 2004, the North Greenland Ice Core Project cut all the way through the ice (over 10,000 feet deep) and brought up a sample of soil from the surface of Greenland (image above.) And a bit of organic matter was embedded in that first four-inch diameter sample of Greenland muck (top right image.) The organic matter might be a pine needle, a piece of bark, or possibly grass. The press release states that, "The presence of plant material under the ice indicates that the Greenland ice sheet formed relatively fast, as a slowly growing glacier would have flushed or pushed these light particles away."...
...The Antarctic ice is a bit deeper than the Greenland ice, but it, too "runs out." Before this, there is no evidence of glaciers anywhere on Earth. Standard Ice Age theory places the beginning of the Ice Ages about 2 million years ago (so far, the ice cores have drilled through 123 thousand layers in Greenland; 174 thousand layers in Antarctica.) And geology books point out that glaciation has been a rare event in Earth's history. The last episode (earlier than our very recent Ice Ages) happened before the first dinosaurs were born. Over 200 million years of Earth's prehistory passed without glaciers...
The spectacular striated ice wall at Fearn Lake
METHANE ALERT!
A microbe from deep in Greenland ice in the process of dividing.
Variations in methane concentration in ice cores, such as the 3,053-meter-long (10,016-foot-long) core obtained by the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, have been used to gauge past climate. In that core, however, some segments within about 100 meters, or 300 feet, of the bottom registered levels of methane as much as 10 times higher than would be expected from trends over the past 110,000 years...
(That's because there's an underwater volcano nearby, you dummies!)