When we hear about Greenland, we start imagining about a land covered with ice with less sunlight. Well, it is not all wrong actually. But, we never imagine what Greenland looked like in the past. And this recent study will tell us about it.

According to researchers, a land mass now called Greenland was ice-free for more than a million years ago. Its bedrock was exposed for around 280,000 years. This is the first time the period was mentioned in a high accuracy, I4U wrote.

There were two reports about Greenland's ice sheet as written by IBTimes. The first study revealed that Greenland ice sheet receded at least once in the past 2.6 million years. This first study was led by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory's Joerg Schaefer in the US. While the second study was led by Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont and it discovered that there were still parts of ice sheet in the location's very east part.

The findings of ice-free Greenland in the past warn scientists and environmentalists that the same condition might likely happen again due to global warming.

How did the research find out the condition of the ice sheet in Greenland? The researchers collected information from isotopes that take shape in rock when the rock is free from an ice sheet. This enables scientists to discover whether there was an ice or not based on the level of the isotopes.

According to Schaefer's study, up to 90% of the ice sheet thinned. In order to obtain the level of an isotope, they estimated Greelance was ice-free for nearly 280,000 years in the Pleistocene era.

However, Bierman's study revealed the otherwise. The study argued that the ice sheet started to vanish in sediment at two sites of the edge of present-day ice shelf. The study said the level of isotopes on both locations indicated an erosion for around the past 7.5 million years.

Soon after this research, Schaefer's team is planning to take rock as samples beneath the ice sheet in the Greenland's south-west part as they want to check whether there was a sign of ice-free during the Plestocene era.