The planet's melting glaciers are releasing a treasure trove of ancient artifacts

Quirks and Quarks17:51How ancient artifacts emerge from melting ice

In the year 1991, a group of hikers stumbled upon an amazingly preserved 5000 year-old corpse in the mountains on the border between Italy and Austria.

It came to be known as Ötzi the Iceman, a glacier mummy who had been locked up in an ice sheet, frozen in time for milllenia. And it turns out, Ötzi was just the beginning. 

As our climate warms, the Earth's glaciers and ice patches are melting. And in the decades since Ötzi's discovery, thousands of artifacts made of wood, fur, feathers and other perishable materials have been popping up around the world after being released from their frigid time capsules.

This has all led to the development of a new field of scientific study called ice patch archeology.

In a new book, ecologist Lisa Baril travels the world to understand what our melting ice is revealing about our past—and what it also says about our future. Baril spoke with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald about her new book The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us about Climate, Culture, and a Future without Ice. Here is part of their conversation.

What made you want to look at the connection between humans and ice through time like this?

Ten years ago I read a short article by a local archaeologist who had found a piece of an ancient hunting weapon called an atlatl, which is also known as a throwing spear. It predates the bow and arrow, and it was found in the mountains near where I live, and it turned out to be 10,300 years old. And I was just amazed that something so old could be preserved for so long in the mountains so close by to where I hike every summer.

How did ice patch archaeology even come to exist as a field of research?

Ice patch archaeology is the study of these artifacts that are melting out of patches of snow and ice that are typically perennial. They exist year round, year in and year out in mountain ranges around the world. And it wasn't until hikers stumbled upon Ötzi, the 5300 year old mummy in the Ötztal Alps of Italy and Austria, that archaeologists wondered, hey, what else might be melting out of these mountain ranges? What else might be encapsulated?

And so it kind of was the inspiration for archaeologists to climb mountain ranges around the world and survey some of these ice patches to see what else might be melting out of them. The other side of that is that this is a discipline that has come about entirely because of our warming climate. And so if the ice isn't melting, archaeologists aren't going to find artifacts.

You mentioned in the book that there's a time factor involved in this.

Yeah, that's right. So one of the most interesting things about ice patch archaeology is that most of the objects contained within the ice are organic, and they belong to once living things, like bird feathers, leather shoes, grass capes, and arrows made of wood. And so these objects are really ephemeral. They decay over time if they're left exposed to the air and sunlight and wind, especially in harsh mountain environments. And so the ice and snow has kept them in a suspended state of animation for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years.

But once they are exposed to the elements, they decay very quickly. And so archaeologists are sort of in a race against time because there are probably a dozen ice patch archaeologists in the world. And there are hundreds of thousands of ice patches that have the potential to have this human record entombed within them. And if they don't go out every year to see what new objects have melted out, we're going to lose anything else that's contained within the ice.

Take me through some of the artifacts that archaeologists have been finding, including this throwing spear that was near your house. What was that all about?

Yeah. It's such an interesting artifact. So this archaeologist, his name is Craig Lee, and he was just looking at these ice patches in the Absaroka Mountains, and he wasn't even really trying to find an artifact. He was actually just milling about. And he happened upon this one particular ice patch, and there was a Doritos bag, and there were other objects that, you know, people had left behind really recently. And he looked over and he saw that there was this stick sticking straight out of the snow. And he thought it looked a bit unusual. And so he pulled it out gently and realized that this is something significant. An ancient hunting weapon, the atlatl foreshaft, and it even had these markings on it that he thinks indicate ownership of the person who used this object to hunt with 10,000 years ago. And so that was just amazing to me that he could see so much in this one piece of wood that many of us might overlook and think, oh, it's just a stick.

Now you also talk a pair of skis that were found in Norway. Tell us about that.

The skis in Norway were found a couple of years apart. Lars Pilø, who's an archaeologist in Norway, found a ski, one wooden plank that had emerged from an ice patch, and it was made of wood and it was attached with fur to its underside, fur lining of an animal, of a reindeer, and these were skins that were used to provide traction in the snow. 

And so a lot of skiers today use skins and they're not made of animal skins anymore but they were used in the same way where going uphill, they provided a nice soft surface to glide over, and also to prevent you from sliding back downhill. And the skiers then used sort of the same sorts of things. And we've been using that same technology for thousands of years.

As our climate changes and more and more glaciers are melting away, what are we losing?

We are losing a cultural record of our past, one that we only just realized existed about 30 years ago. And so we've only had this really short window where we've been able to see what our relationship is to not only these mountain environments, but to the ice and snow itself and to the animals that are attracted to this ice and snow.

We are currently headed to a world without ice, and I just want readers to really think about what that means. There's one aspect where we are going to lose a lot of our water sources because mountains are the water towers of the world. So there's going to be a lot of changes in terms of where we are able to get our water from, but also there's a lot of other cultural aspects that we associate with ice, like there will be no more sledding down hills in the winter, there will be no more ice skating and hot chocolate afterwards and building of snowmen. And I think those things, although they're not obviously as important as our water source, they are important to our humanity and to our relationship to the world.

Q&A has been edited for length and clarity