The Long Read: Are the secrets we need to battle climate change hidden in the glaciers?

By peering into the largest glaciers on earth, scientists hope to determine whether we’ll have time to respond to climate change — or whether it’s already too late, writes Jon Gertner

AT ONE point several hundred thousand years ago, snow began falling over the centre of the Earth’s largest island. The snow did not melt, and in the years that followed, storms brought even more.

All around Greenland, the arctic temperatures remained low enough for the snow to last past spring and summer. It piled up, year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium. Eventually, the snow became the Greenland ice sheet, a blanket of ice so huge that it covered 650,000 square miles and reached a thickness of 10,000ft in places.