Canada's glaciers are fast melting and exposing 40,000-year-old lands

Baffin Island is the world's fifth-largest island, located west of Greenland, has been shown to be melting precipitously. Photo: TNS

It has been nearly 120,000 years since Earth was this warm, and 40,000 years since some ice-swathed Arctic lands have seen the sun.

This is one conclusion of a study published recently in the journal Nature Communications, in which researchers carbon-dated plants collected at the edges of 30 ice caps on Baffin Island, in the Canadian Inuit territory of Nunavut.