Melting of glaciers frees ancient secrets

[donsu]

http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news310.htm

-snip-

Biologist Gerry Kuzyk was hiking with his wife in the remote reaches of the Yukon when he caught the scent of caribou dung wafting through the chill air. Then he saw it — the biggest pile of animal droppings he had ever seen, 2½ meters high and stretching over a kilometer of mountainside.

-snip-

The mystery was solved by lab analysis: The dung, the product of innumerable migrating caribou herds, had been frozen for thousands of years and only recently exposed by melting ice. Along with the dung, the scientists soon discovered an arsenal of Stone Age darts, arrows and spears.

For most scientists, the warming of the planet is a disturbing trend that could radically alter the environment. But for archaeologists, it has prompted a breathtaking treasure hunt. Without doing any digging, scientists are scooping up artifacts, mummies and fossils long hidden in the depths of monstrous glaciers.

-snip-

Arctic lupine seeds frozen for 10,000 years, for example, grew into healthy plants once they were removed from Ice Age lemming burrows. The ice holds a zoo of perfectly mummified animals: fish, wapiti, sheep, mountain goats, moose, voles and birds.

"They're so beautifully preserved, they look like they're asleep," Farnell said. "You can't tell whether they died last week or died 4,000 years ago."
-snip-
----------------------------------

the melting glaciers will cause greater warming as the ice reflected the sun's heat and baren earth does not. so the glaciers will melt ever faster. the scientists better collect artifacts as quickly as they can.

[shadu]

1. monstrous glaciers!

conjures up quite an image

[donsu]

6. if you ever stood at the foot of one - they are monstrous

(some more so then others)

[trotsky]

2. The supreme irony...

Only with the potential self-destruction of our species do we get to unearth clues that could conceivably tell us about our past.

[Festivito]

3. ...just in time to thwart or watch our demise. nt.

[Boomer]

4. Now you see it, now you don't

There's something incredibly eerie about seeing these artifacts of a time in which the world was emerging from ice, with vast lands suddenly open for exploration. The dawn of a new age being revealed to those of us who are about to plunge back into darkness.

I also have this vision of humans 50,000 years from now tripping across the newly-defrosted corpse of an urban commuter and marveling over the well-preserved fabric of his Brooks Brother suit, Gucci wallet, Bic ballpoint pen and Dell laptop. I wonder if his wrist watch will keep on ticking....

[donsu]

5. I've often thought of future people wondering over our trash mountains

nt

[sandlapper]

7. An odd thought occurred to me--

"The mystery was solved by lab analysis: The dung, the product of innumerable migrating caribou herds, had been frozen for thousands of years and only recently exposed by melting ice. Along with the dung, the scientists soon discovered an arsenal of Stone Age darts, arrows and spears."

If the dung was under a glacier along with darts, arrows and spears doesn't that inherently imply that the glacier had melted past that point when they were deposited there? That would also imply that the glaciation accumulated again after the major melting of the last ice age. That also doesn't fit well since inherently one of the definitions of a glacier is that it moves downhill as gravity imposes forces on the accreting mass. That would tend to imply that the "dung heap" was either a great deal younger than the writer implies or the writer totally misunderstood what he was writing about. Sounds like much ado about nothing!

[Nihil]

11. Depends ...

> That would tend to imply that the "dung heap" was either a great deal
> younger than the writer implies or the writer totally misunderstood
> what he was writing about.

... or that the dung "heap" was deposited in different layers over the
glacier surface as the migrating caribou crossed it. The arrows, etc.,
would also only be left on the surface, to be covered with the next
snowfall until they had been incorporated in the upper layers of the
glacier.

Only when the glacier melted would they return to a single plane - the
surface of the earth at the time of the thaw - and give the impression
of contemporaneous deposits.

i.e., They were not deposited before the glacier arrived (or even in
the early stages as the pressure from the ice above would, as you said,
crush them out of shape) but, rather, after the ice had built up.

Nihil

[gate of the sun]

8. I hate to ask it but why did so many animals freeze like that

at once. I've heard that it can happen but it implies the ice came on very suddenly.

[terryg11]

9. usually they fall into the glacier

there are examples of people gone missing for years only to be thawed out one spring and mystery solved. It's really strange but those glaciers are very dangerous to hike around even if you know what you are doing

[RainDog]

10. Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle was a female writer who was a contemporary of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald in Paris in the 20s. She wrote a short story set in Switzerland in which a man is discovered who had fallen into a crevice and been frozen for decades.

The rescue crew brought him back into the small village near the mountain and his fiance at the time he was missing had become an old woman, while he, frozen in the ice, looked the same age as when he went missing some fifty years before.

That story has always stuck with me.

[terryg11]

17. Esquire article a few months ago

talked about a very similar case that happened eleven years ago?

a Canadian hockey player was in Europe and went snowboarding at a resort in Switzerland (I think it was Switzerland) about eleven years ago and wnt missing. His family searched for him for years but found nothing. Then last year (maybe the year before) during a spring thaw a skier came down a slope and found this guy half thawed out of the friggin' ice!!! They confirmed it was him by his wallet and stuff, looked exactly like he did years ago.

But the really crazy thing is the people there said this has happened numerous times before. They've had people thaw out from almost seveny years ago. They found these two climbers still attached together by their rope thawed out of the ice. crazy stuff those glaciers.

[CaptainClark23]

18. Question

I was reading something not too long ago, the "Coming Global Superstorm" (might not be precise title) which posits a theory of very sudden meteorological phenomena which theoretically are capable of dumping huge amounts of ice and snow in a very short time(talking about 10+ feet/hour here).

I know this book has been dismissed by many professionals in the field and embraced by some. My own untrained opinion is that they offer enough circumstantial evidence for the theory to be at least plausible, should the perfect conditions for such phenomena arise.

The book describes in particular a wooly mammoth found in Siberia I think. The animal apparently froze standing upright. In its digestive system were perserved fresh food which had not been digested, suggesting that however this animal ended up encased in ice, it was sudden. There was no indication of injury or illness. In effect, it seems that the mammoth was literally frozen in place.

Thoughts, remarks?

Thanks in advance.

[terryg11]

20. I would think it;s totally possible

when mother nature decides it's time to rearrange the furniture then the damn furniture is going to get moved!!! Obviously there have been some incredible changes in climate on earth since it cooled off and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if something like that happened and could again

[RainDog]

21. just my guess, but...

couldn't that wooly mammoth have been the victim of a navalanch?

have you ever seen (I've only seen them on documentaries, never in person) the stories of climbers, etc. who have been buried in navalanches? A lot of snow can move in seconds that way.

[theHandpuppet]

12. Okay, here's my stupid question for the day...

.. directed at those of you with a more scientific background.

Is it possible that this melting of glacial and polar ice, having harbored all manner of flora and fauna in a deep-freeze stasis for thousands of years, might result in the release of some kind of nasty bug (as in virus or bacteria) we haven't encountered in modern times?

This is probably a really stupid question, but I thought I'd ask anyway! :D

[Pale Blue Dot]

13. I don't think that that's a stupid question at all

I think it's a very interesting (and potentially scary) question.

[Nihil]

14. Not stupid in the least

Bear in mind that bodies buried in the frozen soil have been exhumed
and the pathogens successfully cultured.

[theHandpuppet]

15. I didn't know that...

Very interesting indeed.

So could such pathogens be released naturally, ie, outside a lab situation? Let me just hypothesize here on one possible scenario...

What if a hungry scavenger -- and I'm using the description very broadly here to include anything from a wolf to a maggot -- actually decided to make a meal of a newly-exposed carcass? Could such pathogens be passed on in such a manner?

I ask this because I assume the pathogens present in these long-frozen carcasses wouldn't spontaneously spring back to life -- or might they?

[terryg11]

16. Crichton's next book maybe?

now that you mention it that is interesting?

[treepig]

19. people are looking for the 1918 influenza strain this way

with mixed success:

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF13/1386.html

Dr. Johan Hultin made it a personal mission to find a sample of the 1918 virus he calls "the most lethal organism in the history of man." A native of Sweden, Hultin was studying microbiology at the University of Iowa in 1949. There, he overheard a virologist say that the clue to understanding the 1918 flu might be found in the bodies of victims who were buried in permafrost.

Before he returned to Sweden, Hultin made a recreational trip up the Alaska Highway in 1949 with his wife. In Fairbanks, he met Otto Geist, the anthropologist whose work led to the founding of the University of Alaska Museum. When Geist heard of Hultin's interest in the 1918 flu, he introduced Hultin to Lutheran missionaries who gave Hultin church records from Alaska villages in 1918. The records included detailed information on the dead, including where they were buried.

Hultin looked at an Alaska permafrost map and selected Brevig Mission as a place that met the requirements of massive flu mortality and frozen ground that might have preserved bodies. He flew to Brevig Mission in 1951. With permission from Native elders, Hultin, Geist and two Iowa researchers opened a mass grave, marked by two crosses. In the grave, missionaries in 1918 buried the bodies of the 72 people who died of the flu.

Hoping to study the virus to see what had made it so deadly, Hultin's goal was the retrieval of live flu virus from the lungs of the victims. He removed lung tissue from four bodies, closed the grave, and returned to Iowa. In a lab there, he tried to revive the virus using a number of different methods. After he failed, Hultin resigned himself to perhaps never solving the mystery.

Fast-forward 46 years to 1997. Hultin, then 72 and living in San Francisco, read an article in the journal Science written by a molecular pathologist, Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger. Taubenberger is chief of the molecular pathology division at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. He and his colleagues developed a method to isolate genetic material from viruses that he applied to the tissue of two young soldiers who died of the flu in 1918. He had access to the unique samples because workers at the pathology institute have been saving autopsy specimens since the Civil War.