Was this polar desert once a lush forest? Ancient DNA holds the answer

In an area of Greenland that is today a purely polar desert (above the Arctic Circle), a group of researchers collected samples, traced DNA and found a huge surprise.

Before the ice and snow two million years ago, this was a lush paradise populated by the now-extinct mastodons.

According to The New York Times, doctors Eske Willerslev and Kurt Kjaer, from the University of Copenhagen, began taking samples of permafrost (a frozen layer of the ground) from the north of Greenland in 2006 and took it to a laboratory.

Early attempts to decipher the frozen DNA in the samples were unsuccessful, however, the scientists were not about to give up.

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But thanks to technological advances and the scientists' perseverance involving many years of work, a team led by Eske Willerslev, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and director of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, made an extraordinary discovery.

The New York Times summarizes what the researchers found in the DNA from the permafrost of the polar desert north of Greenland: "They found 102 different kinds of plants — including 78 that had previously been identified from fossils and 24 new ones."

Birches, poplars and pines stood, according to this research, where today there is only frozen land.

DNA was also found from plants whose flower appears be an antecedent of the current roses.

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In addition to the aforementioned mastodon, according to DNA traces, there were also caribou in the polar desert of Greenland. A typical Arctic animal but whose traces had never been found so far north.

Hares, geese, and lemmings also had their home in this remote polar region.

DNA was also found from ants and crabs that lived in a land which now has hardly any life.

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The outstanding achievement of all these findings (made public in a Nature article) is the ability to travel so far back in time (two million years) by analyzing DNA in permafrost samples to when what is now frozen land was once fertile and green.

What was analyzed in northern Greenland is the oldest known DNA. Amazingly it is even older than the DNA of a mammoth from 1,200,000 years ago that scientists from the Stockholm Paleogenetics Center found in 2021.

According to The New York Times, there is now a project underway to go much further back in history and attempt to detect DNA from five million years ago! But where will the samples be collected from?

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Scientists hope to collect ice samples from Canada in which they hope to find traces of what life on earth was like four million years ago.

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However, to get to the DNA of dinosaurs, researchers say that one would have to find material from five million years ago or more, which is nearly impossible.

Studies like this show us how there were other radical climate changes in the past, and they can help us understand where the planet is headed.

Findings like the one in Greenland confirm that the history of the planet is one of change and surprise.

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Looking ahead, Dr. Andrew Christ, a geoscientist at the University of Vermont, tells The New York Times: "Life will adapt, but in ways we don't expect."