As the world warms, ice-patch archaeologists have been scrambling to document the refuse from thousands of years of life on earth that has been preserved within the once-vast ice fields. We recently spoke with Lisa Baril, author of The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us about Climate, Culture, and a Future Without Ice, about what this means for all of us.
While this conversation can feel a bit grim, I mean, the title of the book asks us to consider a world without ice, it is also exciting to think of what scientists are learning about ancient humans, extinct species, and microorganisms. The race to document the rapidly melting world has brought scientists from a variety of backgrounds together to investigate the cultural, biological, and ecological impacts of the new realities we are encountering every day. This could lead to a greater understanding of how humans have navigated change in the past, provide clues about how to mitigate some of the impacts of a warming world, or鈥攁s my brain exposed to X-Files during formative years can鈥檛 help but wonder鈥攊t could also lead to the thawing of ancient viruses that will wreak untold havoc鈥� only time will tell.
This urgency, to document or 鈥渟ave鈥� cultural resources as the doomsday clock ticks ever faster, is what has ice-patch archaeologists scrambling.
For us west coasters, our climate change reality is primarily drought and fire. But the water we lack is posing its own challenges across the globe. With the recent devastation in North Carolina, I had heard that flooding not only destroyed buildings and communities, but scoured the earth down to bedrock. This poses a challenge for those left with little to no land to rebuild upon, and also means that archaeological deposits were scoured from the landscape, effectively erasing artifacts, heirlooms, and archaeological deposits that chronicle the long history of the people who had lived in these places and spaces. And this urgency, to document or 鈥渟ave鈥� cultural resources as the doomsday clock ticks ever faster, is what has ice-patch archaeologists scrambling.
I took a university class on European prehistory in my undergrad days, and was fascinated by the story of 脰tzi, the Iceman. Encountered in the early 1990s in the 脰tzal Alps on the border of Italy and Austria, this tattooed ancient man was murdered and abandoned with his belongings in a harsh mountain landscape, only to be unceremoniously 鈥渄iscovered鈥� more than 5,000 years later. After decades of study into what has become know as Europe鈥檚 oldest natural mummy (and one of its earliest true crime cases), scientists have learned much about this man, his life, and the world in which he lived. The frozen conditions that preserved him allowed us to see what his last meal was, what he was wearing, what was in his tool kit鈥攎ost of which would never be possible without the ice to cryogenically suspend the deterioration of these fragile organic materials.
Likewise, a 10,000-year-old atlatl dart found in Yellowstone National Park in 2007 allowed researchers the rare opportunity to hold a sophisticated ancient technology in their own hands. Around the world, the melt is exposing textiles used for clothing, shoes, and basketry, wooden dishes and tools, all of which reflect the skill and beauty of the everyday objects from long ago that we usually have to imagine based on tiny traces.
Baril writes that glaciers are one of our most obvious metrics for global warming, yet, 鈥渨hile it is tempting to think of ice-patch archaeology as a silver lining to climate change, its very existence also signals its own demise.鈥� The relatively new-found field might be offering job security for the next few years, but it comes with the bittersweet responsibility of documenting the vastness of life on earth as it grows demonstratively smaller. The loss of glaciers has an impact on drinking water, agriculture, sea levels, as well as the human, animal, and plant communities that will be climate refugees dependent on, and competing for, fewer resources. It seems like we are long past any quick fixes for the situation we find ourselves in, but there are things we can do both collectively and as individuals to slow the completion of the melt, and keep those ice-patch archaeologists working just a little bit longer.
