By Allison Kubo New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that in the last 1.1 Ma the Greenland Ice sheet melted at least once and reformed. The team found fossilized plants buried under 1 million years of snow based on the Camp Century Ice Core. The long core samples the layers of snow in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Silvan Leinss , Radar reflector installation Greenland , CC BY-SA 4.0 The deeper the core the older the ice is and at its deepest point the Greenland Ice Sheet measures approximately 1.9 miles. Finding dirt and plant material in the core under layers of ice indicates it was once covered with plants and maybe even trees. The researchers used cosmogenic isotopes , atoms that are only formed when radiation from space and the sun interact with dirt, to show that it melted at least once within the last 1 million years. Although it may seem like a long time, 1 million years is an eyeblink to geologists. This research indicates that
By: Hannah Pell On 29 March 2021, the Biden administration announced another ambitious clean energy goal: deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. According to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the U.S. offshore wind capacity was 28,521 megawatts (or 28.5 gigawatts) in 2019. Deploying an additional 30 gigawatts over a decade would more than double the current U.S. offshore wind energy generation capability. How much power is 30 GW? It could be enough to power 10 million homes for a full year, offsetting 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions ( equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from 16,851,398 cars driven over a year and CO2 emissions from more than 8.7 billion gallons of gasoline consumed or 20 coal-fired power plants over the course of a year). So how does energy generation from offshore wind work, and how is it different from land-based wind? What role does offshore wind play in our national energy portfolio? And what are the particular