Ice-melt archaeology

Rember Otzi? Well, there's more

BBC News - Ancient artefacts found in melting snow

Iron implements would have survived melting out in (for example) a medieval warm period, but not textiles. Pretty interesting stuff. We might expect a lot more interesting things to be revealed as the ice melt continues.

 

Remember "The Thing" ? If some horrible critter survives, trapped under ice somewhere, and melts out, the lining might not be silver.

Not trying to be off the wall alarmist. I just think that there are some climate-related plotlines that science-fiction authors have totally failed to develop. It's been a long time since "Who goes there?" was published (1938)

 

@5 - sigh, you make me hunt down the publication. I find that my library privileges extend only to the June 2013 issue, not July. But here's the abstract:

"High altitude snowfields provide repositories of well-preserved organic remains of considerable antiquity, as spectacular discoveries such as the Similaun Iceman illustrate. In Scandinavia, melting snow patches have been systematically surveyed by volunteer groups for almost a century, and a growing collection of archaeological artefacts has been recovered. Only recently, however, has AMS dating confirmed that some of the finds go back as far as the Neolithic. Here fragments of five Neolithic arrowshafts and a Neolithic longbow discovered in 2010–11 in the Oppdal area of Norway are described. They throw light on Neolithic bow and arrow technology and tangentially on the hunting techniques which may have attracted hunters to these snow patches in search of game. The progressive and accelerated melting of the snow patches in recent years draws attention to processes of climate change and the urgency of discovering and recovering these fragile perishable artifacts”

AMS means accelerator mass spectrometer. That means the items contain carbon. Based on the abstract, it is wood. Neolithic wood. Neolithic means sometime between 10,000 and 2,000 BC. Such wood, had it melted out earlier, would have decomposed. So, it did not. But it is melting out now.

So here we have another ‘teachable moment’, thanks to my most ardent foil at PC. Somebody remind me next month, maybe I can get the entire article then. Find out about the textiles.

Similaun Iceman = Otzi, by the way. 3,300 BC, also dated by AMS. These perishable things are melting out now, have not done so for thousands of years, and misreading does not constitute contrary evidence.