The Arctic Circle is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world, and a landscape not seen for thousands of years is being revealed as the glaciers and snow cover get smaller and smaller.

The deep fjords and ancient glaciers of Canada's Baffin Island is sprouting ancient plants that are beginning to wake up from their natural slumber.

"The strange thing about these mosses is that a lot of them can just start growing again, so they're the closest thing to a zombie that I know of, the living dead," said Geologist and paleoclimatologist Gifford Miller from University of Colorado Boulder.  

Radiocarbon dating shows the plants are 40,000 to 120,000 years old, which takes it back to the most recent Ice Age.  But the scientists' study is also cataloguing evidence that this century is the warmest one in 115,000 years.   The melting is occurring most faster than normal and touching nearly every corner of Baffin Island.

"You'd normally expect to see different plant ages in different topographical conditions," says lead author Simon Pendleton, an expert in glacial geology at the University of Colorado Boulder.  "A high elevation location might hold onto its ice longer, for example. But the magnitude of warming is so high that everything is melting everywhere now.  We haven't seen anything as pronounced as this before."