There’s a brand new northernmost island, and it was found fairly accidentally within the icy waters above Greenland final month. The little strip of land has no vegetation, however researchers are hoping to search out life within the samples they collected there.

A scientific expedition led by Morten Rasch, a geomorphologist on the University of Copenhagen, was within the space doing sampling after they noticed the small island, which they estimate measures roughly 165 toes large (50 meters) and 260 toes (80 meters) lengthy. Sitting within the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland, this new island is even farther north than the earlier record-holder, a small strip of land referred to as Oodaaq, Reuters reports.

According to Rasch, such islands “come and go” and may kind when ice collides with the ocean backside.

“They develop by ice piling up along the shore during storms,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Some of this ice might hit the sea-bottom and bulldoze it until it reaches the sea surface and beyond. This is probably a process that appears once in a while in the region.”

As to why nobody had documented the island earlier than, Rasch famous that “the area is pretty remote—in fact, we were the only expedition this summer.”

While no vegetation or animals had been seen on the island, the researchers took samples and imagine they’ll discover micro organism and different microscopic life.

“We wanted to take samples from the island, because the environment out there is very unusual (tough),” Rasch stated. “We therefore wanted to describe what kind of bacteria and other microorganisms that could live there.”

The expedition was within the space conducting analysis primarily on local weather change, however Rasch defined that the looks of this island possible has no connection to world warming. “We saw many other effects of climate change during the expedition, but the island was not one of them,” he stated.

The Arctic, although, is present process main shifts resulting from rising carbon air pollution. That contains the speedy disappearance of sea ice, explosive wildfires, temperatures rising at almost thrice the speed of the remainder of the globe, and permafrost thawing in methods which might be wreaking havoc with infrastructure. Land ice can also be disappearing, together with a latest main meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet following unprecedented rains earlier this month.