"There is a big possibility that this material is several million years old -- from a time when trees covered Greenland," Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, who heads a team of international scientists involved in the North Greenland Ice-core Project, said in a statement.

"The presence of plant material under the ice indicates that the Greenland ice sheet formed relatively fast, as a slowly growing glacier would have flushed or pushed these light particles away."

Dahl-Jensen, of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute, said the findings were important as they could shed light on the past climate and environment and could answer questions as to whether exotic life forms still exist under the ice.

She said the remnants of plants were discovered in samples recovered from beneath the ice cap this summer.

"Reaching bedrock, frozen reddish mud was recovered with several centimetre-sized fragments of organic material looking like pine needles or pieces of bark," Dahl-Jensen said.

The North Greeland Ice-core Project is an international project that involves participants from nine countries. It aims to understand the last ice age, which swept over much of the earth's northern hemisphere more than 100,000 years ago.

TERRA.WIRE