BENEATH GREENLAND'S ICE CAP

Explore the secret landscape concealed by the ice of this Arctic island nation

- WORDS AILSA HARVEY

There's so much ice covering Greenland that if it all melted, it would raise global sea levels by 7.5 metres. But this ice sheet, which spans an area of about 656,374 square miles, hasn't always been there. Tens of thousands of years ago, the rocky landscape that's now crushed and buried in ice was visible at the surface. Greenland was mostly ice-free between 424,000 and 374,000 years ago, as most of its ice sheet formed during the ice age 188,000 to 130,000 years ago. Greenland's present ice sheet accumulated during two further events - one of which took place during the last ice age and saw the ice spread close to today's size around 12,000 years ago.