Temperatures on Greenland Warmest in At Least 1,000 Years

As humans fiddle with the planet’s thermostat, scientists are piecing together Greenland’s history by drilling ice cores to analyze how the climate crisis has impacted the island country over the years.

The further down they drilled, the further they went back in time, allowing them to separate which temperature fluctuations were natural and which were human-caused.

After years of research on the Greenland ice sheet, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature that temperatures there have been the warmest in at least the last 1,000 years – the longest amount of time their ice cores could be analyzed to. And they found that between 2001 and 2011, it was on average 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was during the 20th century.