A GREEN GREENLAND

GREENLAND, THE LEGEND goes, was named so by the Viking Erik the Red in what is bound to be one of the first acts of “creative” marketing. Erik was exiled to the island after committing murder and he hoped that by calling the sparse, polar desert “green”, he might attract more settlers from Northern Europe. Now, after 16 years of painstaking work, scientists have managed to gather DNA from animals that lived over 2 million years ago in a lush forest where there is now a vast, cold desert.

That Greenland was once green has been known for some time now. What the latest set of DNA has done is enable a form of time travel, to over 1 million years farther back than has been done before. At the time, the Arctic was almost 20 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today. The forests housed mastodons and hares and carnivores like saber-toothed cats. The sea had crabs and fish that are unthinkable in the region today. And perhaps, most significantly, the flora and fauna would have had to adapt to the kind of climate change - perhaps even of a greater magnitude - than the warming of the planet due to human activities is causing today.

In 16 years, with some advancements in DNA sequencing, scientists have managed to push back the boundaries of life on a large swathe of the planet by millennia. Meanwhile, Erik, the Red is probably smiling beyond the grave. His ad campaign for a home-in-exile was not a lie, after all. He just missed the date.

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