As an avid hiker, I’ve often noticed patches of snow tucked along ridge lines even in late summer in North America’s Rocky Mountains and other mountain ranges around the world. I assumed they were just left over snow from the previous winter, or perhaps from a few recent winters. It turns out I’m probably wrong. Many of these inconspicuous ice patches might have persisted for 10,000 years or more, and some contain a trove of unique ancient artefacts and climate information.
In The Age of Melt, science journalist Lisa Baril takes the reader on a well-crafted and entertaining journey into Earth’s frozen realms. This ‘cryosphere’ includes the great polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, sea and lake ice, permafrost, mountain glaciers and semi-permanent ice patches. Baril focuses on the last two categories, because they exist at mid- and low latitudes, where the most people live and have direct contact with ice. It is this interaction between humans and the ice — in the past, present and future — that most interests the author.
The journey starts high in the Alps, on the border between Italy and Austria, with the 1991 discovery of a human body revealed by the melting of an ice patch. The body and belongings of Ötzi, as he has become known, had been preserved for more than 5,000 years. This was possible thanks to the characteristics that distinguish ice patches from glaciers. Glaciers flow slowly downhill, pulled down by their own weight, moving ice from colder and wetter upper regions to warmer, drier lower regions, where the ice melts. This flow results in continual replacement, so the ice in most mountain glaciers is less than a few centuries old. Moreover, the flow rapidly buries, crushes and tears apart any material that falls onto a glacier. Ice patches are smaller and thinner than glaciers, and do not flow. This means that the ice is not replaced, and so can be thousands of years old. If conditions are right, materials that fall onto an ice patch’s surface can be frozen and preserved with little alteration.
As Baril discusses, many of Ötzi’s belongings were composed of once-living organic materials, such as plant fibres, wood and leather, that, together with his body, would soon have decayed had they not been frozen. Unlike inorganic artefacts made of stone or metal, the age of these organic objects can be determined accurately using carbon dating. The discovery of Ötzi’s spectacularly preserved body and belongings provided researchers with a unique window into Neolithic civilization in the Alps, and launched a field called ice-patch archaeology.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03336-y?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-usOopsie, I suppose this conflicts with their current argument about "warming", but they'll deny it or make some other $h!t up.
