Climate Change Reveals Unique Artifacts in Melting Ice Patches
upstart writes:
Climate change reveals unique artifacts in melting ice patches:
Sometime around 2000 BCE, a red-wing thrush died at Skiradalskollen in the Dovrefjell mountain range. Its small body quickly became buried under an ice patch. Upon emerging again 4,000 years later, its internal organs are still intact.
In recent years, hundreds of such discoveries have been made in ice patches, revealing traces of hunting, trapping, traffic, animals and plant life -- small, frozen moments of the past.
[...] "A survey based on satellite images taken in 2020 shows that more than 40 per cent of 10 selected ice patches with known finds have melted away. These figures suggest a significant threat for preserving discoveries from the ice, not to mention the ice as a climate archive," says Skar.
"The time is ripe for establishing a national monitoring programme using remote sensing and systematically securing archaeological finds and biological remains from ice patches. We should also use this programme to collect glaciological data from different parts of the country, since the ice patches can provide detailed data on how the climate has evolved over the last 7500 years," she said.
[...] "We used to think of the ice as desolate and lifeless and therefore not very important. That's changing now, but it's urgent. Large amounts of unique material are melting out and disappearing forever. Finds can provide important information about the history of both people and nature," he said.
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