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A new island has been discovered in the Arctic after rising temperatures melted the giant ice sheet which covered it. The rocky mass - dubbed Warming Island - lies 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland, reports The Sun. It was found by US explorer Dennis Schmitt 60 and is seen as further proof of global warming. Danish mapping expert Hans Jepsen said: "It was clearly detached from the mainland when the connecting glacier-bridge retreated southward." Explorer Schmitt said: "There is a dark side to this. We were all aware of the dire consequences."

Americans now have responsibility for a bunch of new places they can’t find on a map. It turns out that the National Security Agency considers Canada, Greenland, Mexico and parts of Central America as part of the U.S. “Homeland.” During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein — chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — displayed a diagram that revealed the NSA considers Mexico, Canada, Greenland and parts of Central American as part of the U.S. ‘Homeland.’ The diagram displayed by Feinstein visualized the 54 events around the world allegedly disrupted by the...

New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago. A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report. The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people. The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate. Rapid climate change occurred 12,900 years ago, and it is proposed that this is associated with the extinction of large mammals...

In the dim light of the Dark Ages, the Irish literary tradition stands out like a beacon. At monastic centres across the island, scribes recorded significant events such as feast days, obituaries and descriptions of extreme cold and heat. These chronicles are generally known as the Irish Annals and in this report, scientists and historians have looked at 40,000 entries in the texts dating from AD431 to 1649. The researchers also looked at the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) ice-core data... The scientists in the team identified 48 volcanic eruptions in the time period spanning 1,219 years. Of these, 38...

The sun over Greenland has risen two days early, baffling scientists and sparking fears that Arctic icecaps are melting faster than previously thought. Experts say the sun should have risen over the Arctic nation's most westerly town, Ilulissat, yesterday, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness. But for the first time in history light began creeping over the horizon at around 1pm on Tuesday - 48 hours ahead of the usual date of 13 January. Thomas Posch, of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Vienna, said that a local change of the horizon was 'by far the most obvious...

SCIENTISTS have been stunned by the discovery of a shark that had eaten a polar bear. Part of the jaw of a young polar bear was found in the stomach of a Greenland shark in Svalbard, northern Norway. Kit Kovacs, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, said: "We've never heard of this before. "We don't know how it got there. We can't say whether or not the shark took a swimming young bear or ate a carcase.

In just a short time, one of the rarest sharks in the world went from swimming in Philippine waters to simmering in coconut milk. The 13-foot-long (4-meter-long) megamouth shark (pictured), caught on March 30 by mackerel fishers off the city of Donsol, was only the 41st megamouth shark ever found, according to WWF-Philippines. Fishers brought the odd creature—which died during its capture—to local project manager Elson Aca of WWF, an international conservation nonprofit. Aca immediately identified it as a megamouth shark and encouraged the fishers not to eat it. But the draw of the delicacy was too great: The 1,102-pound...

· Meltwater plays only small role in glacier flow · Study casts doubt on 'lubrication' theory Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research. Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought. Receding ice sheets are of major concern to climate scientists because the melting water could lead to a rise in sea levels. In...

Readers may recall the breathless wailing over a brief period of surface melt detected by satellites last year. The way the media and alarmists who drive the media behaved, you’d think that global warming had set the planet on fire. Maybe their beef was over the red color in the satellite image that accompanied the press release. Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right) 2012. Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In...

Greenland's prime minister warned the European Union he could scrap a preliminary deal intended to safeguard the bloc's access to his country's huge mineral resources, saying Brussels has failed to follow through. "I don't understand the behavior of the (European) Commission," leftist Kuupik Kleist said on Wednesday in his office... Kleist's comments to Reuters signal Greenland may be increasingly willing to play off rival powers from Brussels to Beijing that are drawn by its minerals as global warming opens up sea routes and mining prospects. Kleist, who grew up harpooning whales from a remote village in northern Greenland, faces a...

Controversy has erupted over next Tuesday's European Parliament resolution "on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU", meant to mark international women's day, after libertarian Swedish MEPs from the Pirate Party spotted the call for a ban in the small print. While not legally binding, the vote could be the first step towards European legislation as the EU's assembly increasingly flexes its political muscle within Europe's institutions.

Study: ‘ Greenland ice sheet is not as sensitive to temperature increases and to ice melting and running out to sea in warm climate periods ‘.The climate graph shows the temperature from the previous warm interglacial period, the Eemian (left) throughout the entire ice age to present time. The blue colours indicate ice from a cold period, the red colour is ice from a warm period and yellow and green is from the climate period in between. The new results show that during the Eemian period 130,000 to 115,000 thousand years ago the climate in Greenland was around 8 degrees...

A new look at the melting of Greenland's ice sheet more than 115,000 years ago reveals that even though the climate was much warmer than today's, the ice was only a few hundred feet thinner than in modern times. Given that sea level was also much higher during this long-ago period, the findings mean that Antarctica must have experienced major melt to boost the oceans. These results could hint at what's to come in today's warming world, the researchers report Thursday (Jan. 24) in the journal Nature. "Even though the warm Eemian period was a period when the oceans were...

Greenland’s Viking settlers, the Norse, disappeared suddenly and mysteriously from Greenland about 500 years ago. Natural disasters, climate change and the inability to adapt have all been proposed as theories to explain their disappearance. But now a Danish-Canadian research team has demonstrated the Norse society did not die out due to an inability to adapt to the Greenlandic diet: an isotopic analysis of their bones shows they ate plenty of seals.“Our analysis shows that the Norse in Greenland ate lots of food from the sea, especially seals,” says Jan Heinemeier, Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University. “Our analysis shows...

(Reuters) - A 200-year period covering the heyday of both the Roman Empire and China's Han dynasty saw a big rise in greenhouse gases, according to a study that challenges the U.N. view that man-made climate change only began around 1800. A record of the atmosphere trapped in Greenland's ice found the level of heat-trapping methane rose about 2,000 years ago and stayed at that higher level for about two centuries. Methane was probably released during deforestation to clear land for farming and from the use of charcoal as fuel, for instance to smelt metal to make weapons, lead author...

By burning wood, humans have been significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions as far back as the Roman Empire, researchers say. The finding may lead scientists to rethink some aspects of climate change models, which assume humans weren't responsible for much greenhouse gas before the Industrial Revolution. "It was believed that emissions started in 1850. We showed that humans already started to impact greenhouse effects much before," study co-author Célia Sapart of Utretcht University in the Netherlands said. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with 20 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, Sapart told LiveScience. Forest fires, wetlands and...

Explanation: Sometimes it's hard to believe what you see in the sky. During the Shelios Expedition to Greenland in late August, even veteran sky enthusiasts saw auroras so colorful, so fast changing, and so unusual in form that they could remember nothing like it. As the ever changing auroras evolved, huge shapes spread across the sky morphed from one familiar form into another, including what looked to be the head of a goat (shown above), the head of an elephant, a strange green-tailed comet, and fingers on a celestial hand. Even without the aurora, the sky would be notable for...

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons. Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one...

<p>The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.</p> <p>The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.</p>

Courted by multinational companies and foreign heads of state over its rare minerals and potential oil resources, Greenland could win full independence from Denmark and join the European Union as a free state, according to one expert on the Arctic. Greenland’s leader Kuupik Kleist is boxing above his weight when it comes to foreign policy. Although the premier represents an autonomous island of just 57,000 people, within the last couple of months he has met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and representatives from the Chinese government. Greenland is a self-ruled territory in...