The Rescue Mission to Save Civilization From the Big Melt
Ice patch archeologists are racing against the clock to find ancient artifacts dislodged by climate change
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It is like looking at something from another planet. The mystery tools are both about five inches long, bleached a pale gray with age and the effects of the weather. They were found just over a month ago, lying on icy ground high in the mountains of Norway. For roughly a thousand years they lay trapped in layers of ice. But now they have melted out.
“We have no idea what they are,” says Julian Robert Post-Melbye, a member of the archaeological team that found the objects and an archaeologist at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. Did they once help fix horse-riding equipment in place? Maybe they were used to shape a specific substance or material. “We just call them ‘wrenches’” Post-Melbye says, “because they look, you know, like wrenches.”
I have come here, to the mountain village of Fossbergom in central Norway, to see these and other objects recently dislodged from the ice. Fossbergom is located in Lom, a municipality with fewer than 2,500 residents, surrounded by three huge national parks crammed with mountains, valleys, and ice. The ice, however, is melting at a quickening rate, and over the past two decades archaeologists have found that more artifacts are appearing — so many they can hardly keep up.
These objects are the fruits of a field known as “glacial archeology” or “ice patch archaeology.” As the world has warmed, melting ice in mountain regions of Norway, Mongolia, and other sub-Arctic nations, as well as Alaska, the Alps, the Rocky Mountains, and the Canadian Yukon, has yielded a growing bounty of exceptionally well-preserved items left behind by Viking hunters, ancient warriors, and long-forgotten travelers — scattered fragments that reveal the technological prowess of departed civilizations.
The ice is melting at a quickening rate, and over the past two decades archaeologists have found that more artifacts are appearing — so many they can hardly keep up.
