Ancient artefacts are melting out of Norwegian glaciers
The term “glacial archaeology” was coined in a Norwegian student newspaper in 1968, but it wasn’t until 2014 that the field gained a dedicated scientific publication, the Journal of Glacial Archaeology. In the publication’s inaugural article, the authors presented data on glacier retreat across the globe and argued that ice patch archaeology had become an urgent business: “Climate models suggest that in the next decades many sites will be lost to melting and decay. Consequently, it is imperative to extend the geographic scope of this research now.” One 2008 paper estimated that in Norway, 98% of glaciers would disappear by the end of the current century. That leaves just eight decades until those glaciers are gone, taking with them innumerable artifacts left behind by human ancestors.
The same urgency was picked up in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report on the Earth’s ice and ocean environments, which was published in September. On the subject of mountain ice, the assessment does not provide much comfort: “Snow cover, glaciers, and permafrost are projected to continue to decline in almost all regions throughout the 21st century.”
It’s a picture matched by recent events. On the same day the IPCC released its report, news broke that 250,000 cubic meters of ice were at risk of collapsing at a glacier on Mont Blanc in Italy. Glaciers in the region have been shrinking thanks to the effects of global warming for many years. In Sweden, the highest mountain in the country was demoted to the second-highest after ice on its peak melted drastically last summer. The IPCC report’s chapter on mountain areas even includes a reference to ice patch archaeology — including the fact that melting ice puts artifacts at risk of destruction.
In Norway, there is little that can be done to save artifacts from this process. In one spot, the park guides sometimes place a blanket over the ice to insulate it and protect it from the worst of the summer heat. But, as Lars Holger Pilø, a member of the research team, put it in an email to me: “The problem of melting ice is simply too enormous to be addressed by blankets.”
Pilø and his colleague Espen Finstad, both of Oppland County Council’s Department of Cultural Heritage, lead the archaeological work in Lom. They organize ice patch surveys in the mountains every summer, but the team must wait until August to find out what conditions will meet them up here — it is devilishly difficult to predict how much ice will actually melt each season. Earlier in the summer, temperatures in Norway weren’t abnormally warm, but then in late July, a heatwave hit northern Europe, causing the month to become the hottest, globally speaking, on record. That means extra work for Finstad’s team, as they rush to find priceless treasures.
When I meet with them one Sunday afternoon, Finstad and his colleagues have just returned from three nights in the mountains. Fresh from the hillsides, Finstad’s hair is wind-tossed and his trousers are still flecked with mud. The log fire in Lom’s Mountain Museum crackles as he tells me of the exceptional finds he and his colleagues have already made this year. Many were scattered across a 300,000-square-meter area in Breheimen National Park. Besides the mysterious wrenches, other finds include a snowshoe for a horse, the sort of device that the team knew once existed but had never seen intact. There were also jawbones of a dead dog, still with its collar, and the hoofs of a horse, likely a thousand years old, still with the metal shoes attached.
While showing me the fletching on the 1,500-year-old arrow shaft, Post-Melbye points to the loops of string used to tie it fast. “These will dry very quickly in the sun,” he says. “They’ll just crack up and blow away.”
“It was so beautiful, just lying there in the ice” says Finstad, remembering the moment he saw the horse snowshoe for the first time. “You try to imagine what happened to this horse,” says Finstad. “It’s obvious it died there. Was it rough terrain? Did it break a leg?” As excited as Finstad and his colleagues are to discover amazingly well-preserved artifacts every year, they all acknowledge that the work is bittersweet. “It’s not like we’re walking in parades, oh hooray, we’re finding lots of stuff,” says Solli.
Some Norwegian ice discoveries predate Finstad and his colleagues’ efforts: A number of arrows were recovered during hot summers in the 1930s, and Oddmunn Farbregd at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim made similar finds in the 1960s and ’70s. But the volume, variety, and age of artifacts emerging now eclipses much of what has been found before.
Finstad was sucked into the world of ice patch archaeology in 2006 when a local man living in Lom brought the grubby remains of a shoe into his office. He and Pilø were unsure how old it could really be. Though tattered, it was recognizably a shoe. Then the radiocarbon dating analysis came in. “It was 3,400 years old,” recalls Finstad, “so really that was kind of an eye-opener.”
In the years since, Finstad and his colleagues have dedicated themselves to ice patch archaeology, turning up literally thousands of objects. On the latest three-night expedition alone, 200 or so items were found by the team — an exceptional tally for fieldwork lasting just half a week.
The “wrenches” puzzle him. His hunch is they have something to do with transport or the harnessing of horses. The mystery might be solved by asking members of the public what they think — an approach that has been successful in the past. To that end, the wrenches may be publicized on the team’s “Secrets of the Ice” social media pages. Their followers enjoy making guesses about what purpose enigmatic objects once served, says Finstad: “And sometimes quite good guesses, so that’s an interesting way to try to involve people’s knowledge.”
The Norwegians’ finds have revealed how adept prehistoric and medieval people were at hunting, and how accustomed they clearly were to traveling in the mountains. Far from being inhospitable terrain rarely traversed in bygone eras, the mountains were clearly places of great economic importance. And the more the ice melts, the deeper we delve back into this past, says Finstad. “History melts out in reverse.”
Finstad has seen for himself remarkable change in the national parks around Lom in recent years. He is troubled by the idea that the mountains he loves may one day be bereft of ice. Not only are the ice patches a visual feature of the mountains, they also provide water to farms in the area. And they offer shelter to reindeer who escape to the mountainsides during the summer. The deer would otherwise be plagued with insects down in the valleys. Snow and ice camouflages other animals hunted by top predators, including birds of prey. The cycle of melting — and freezing again — benefits the plants and forests here. Ice is part of the entire mountain ecosystem. Its loss will not just be devastating for archaeology, but for life itself in this place. The same story will be repeated along many other mountain ranges all over the world.
For Finstad, his work is far from over. He plans to keep coming back, year after year, rescuing fragments of humanity’s past. But for the foreseeable future, the mountains will continue to transform around him. He says that while he does not engage in climate change “activism” himself, he has no doubts about why the mountains are changing: “The planet is warming because of too much CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s human-made,” he says. “To imagine that my grandchildren will walk up here in a completely different landscape, I think that’s really, really sad.”
As he speaks, the warm sunlight of an August afternoon streams through the window. Finstad gestures to the mountaintops, where that same heat is bearing down on once-proud stacks of age-old ice, forcing them to drip away to nothing.
“It should be glaciers,” he says. “It should be snow up here.”
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2OS6K3U