Greenland

Scientists have identified an expanse of rock in Greenland as a remnant of Earth's crust dating back 3.8 billion years, a finding that shows the dynamic geological process called plate tectonics was occurring early in the planet's history. A Norwegian team reported Friday in the journal Science that these ancient layered rocks from southwestern Greenland originally were formed on the sea floor of primordial Earth.

Ice-covered Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests in a climate much like that of Sweden and eastern Canada today. An international team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from the bottom of an ice core that indicates the presence of pine, yew and alder trees as well as insects. The researchers, led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, say this is the first proof that there was forest in southern Greenland.

Greenland's vast glaciers are dumping ice into the ocean three times faster than they did 10 years ago because of increasing temperatures, suggesting that sea level could rise even more quickly than current projections. The study, published today in the journal Science, found that the glaciers contributed 53 cubic miles of water to the Atlantic Ocean in 2005, resulting in about a 0.02-inch rise in sea level.

Gripping a bottle of Jack Daniel's between his knees, Jay Zwally savored the warmth inside the tiny plane as it flew low across Greenland's biggest and fastest-moving outlet glacier. Mile upon mile of the steep fjord was choked with icy rubble from the glacier's disintegrated leading edge. More than six miles of the Jakobshavn had simply crumbled into open water. "My God!" Zwally shouted over the hornet whine of the engines.

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the last five years has occurred in Greenland, based on satellite measurements of ice weight, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The findings were presented Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

Parents who travel with children often say that in some of the most exotic, faraway places they are befriended, even welcomed, into people's homes because they have their little ones in tow. In the early '70s, 10-month-old Kari Herbert served as just such an icebreaker for her mother and father in an Inuit hunting village on a remote, icebound islet off the northwest coast of Greenland, 860 miles south of the North Pole.

Terra incognita is no more. Assumptions about faraway places are easy and plausible in this shrinking, digital world. From a book or a photograph, we can construe the habits of a people; from a movie or a download, we consider them neighbors. Yet as the plane rose above the fog that midsummer morning, flying northeast into the sun, I had no notion of what lay ahead.

Pitching a makeshift tent on the sea ice, where the Arctic Ocean meets the North Atlantic, brothers Mamarut and Gedion Kristiansen are ready to savor their favorite meal. Nearby lies the carcass of a narwhal, a reclusive beast with an ivory tusk like a unicorn's. Mamarut slices off a piece of muktuk, the whale's raw pink blubber and mottled gray skin, as a snack. "Peqqinnartoq," he says in Greenlandic. Healthy food. Mamarut's wife, Tukummeq Peary, a descendant of famed North Pole explorer Adm.

Greenland's huge ice sheet could melt within the next 1,000 years and swamp low-lying areas around the globe if emissions of carbon dioxide and global warming are not reduced, scientists said Wednesday. A meltdown of the massive ice sheet, which is more than 1.8 miles thick, would raise sea levels by an average 21 feet, threatening countries such as Bangladesh, islands in the Pacific and parts of Florida.