Ötzi the Iceman May Have Scaled Ice-Free Alps

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Otzi the Iceman may have scaled ice-free Alps:

Otzi the Iceman, a Copper Age wanderer found mummified in the Alps nearly three decades ago, may have lived at a time when the glaciers were advancing down from the highest peaks to the lower slopes of the mountains.

[...] But a new analysis of ice only 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) from where Otzi was found suggests that only the very highest peaks were covered in glaciers until slightly before the iceman's lifetime. Just a few hundred years before Otzi was born, nearby mountains may have been ice-free.

[...] The two ice cores analyzed in the new study came from the summit glacier of Weiseespitze in the Austrian part of the Otzal Alps, at about 11,500 feet (3,500 m) elevation. Bohleber and his colleagues ferried themselves and their equipment to the summit by helicopter and drilled 36 feet (11 m) down to where the ice was frozen fast to the bedrock. This was crucial for a continuous record of ice, because meltwater not only carries away the historical record as it flows but causes the ice to slide and deform, also erasing decades or centuries of data. Fortunately, the ice at the base of the Weiseespitze glacier had never melted[...]

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