As Earth Warms, Human History Is Melting Away (nytimes.com) 37
Climate change is revealing long-frozen artifacts and animals to archaeologists. But the window for study is slender and shrinking. From a report: Glacial archaeology is a relatively new discipline. The ice was literally broken during the summer of 1991 when German hikers in the Otztal Alps spotted a tea-colored corpse half-embedded on the Italian side of the border with Austria. Initially mistaken for a modern-day mountaineer killed in a climbing accident, Otzi the Iceman, as he came to be called, was shown through carbon-dating to have died about 5,300 years ago.
A short, comprehensively tattooed man in his mid-40s, Otzi wore a bearskin cap, several layers of clothing made of goat and deer hides, and bearskin-soled shoes stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm. The Iceman's survival gear included a longbow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a copper ax and a kind of crude first-aid kit full of plants with powerful pharmacological properties. A chest X-ray and a CT scan showed a flint arrowhead buried deep in Otzi's left shoulder, suggesting that he may have bled to death. His killing is humankind's oldest unsolved cold case. Six years later, in the Yukon's snow fields, hunting tools dating back thousands of years appeared from the melting ice. Soon, similar finds were reported in Western Canada, the Rockies and the Swiss Alps.
In 2006, a long, hot autumn in Norway resulted in an explosion of discoveries in the snowbound Jotunheimen mountains, home to the JÃtnar, the rock and frost giants of Norse mythology. Of all the dislodged detritus, the most intriguing was a 3,400-year-old proto-Oxford most likely fashioned out of reindeer hide. The discovery of the Bronze Age shoe signified the beginning of glacial surveying in the peaks of Innlandet County, where the state-funded Glacier Archaeology Program was started in 2011. Outside of the Yukon, it is the only permanent rescue project for discoveries in ice. Glacial archaeology differs from its lowland cousin in critical ways. G.A.P. researchers usually conduct fieldwork only within a short time frame from mid-August to mid-September, between the thaw of old snow and the arrival of new.
A short, comprehensively tattooed man in his mid-40s, Otzi wore a bearskin cap, several layers of clothing made of goat and deer hides, and bearskin-soled shoes stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm. The Iceman's survival gear included a longbow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a copper ax and a kind of crude first-aid kit full of plants with powerful pharmacological properties. A chest X-ray and a CT scan showed a flint arrowhead buried deep in Otzi's left shoulder, suggesting that he may have bled to death. His killing is humankind's oldest unsolved cold case. Six years later, in the Yukon's snow fields, hunting tools dating back thousands of years appeared from the melting ice. Soon, similar finds were reported in Western Canada, the Rockies and the Swiss Alps.
In 2006, a long, hot autumn in Norway resulted in an explosion of discoveries in the snowbound Jotunheimen mountains, home to the JÃtnar, the rock and frost giants of Norse mythology. Of all the dislodged detritus, the most intriguing was a 3,400-year-old proto-Oxford most likely fashioned out of reindeer hide. The discovery of the Bronze Age shoe signified the beginning of glacial surveying in the peaks of Innlandet County, where the state-funded Glacier Archaeology Program was started in 2011. Outside of the Yukon, it is the only permanent rescue project for discoveries in ice. Glacial archaeology differs from its lowland cousin in critical ways. G.A.P. researchers usually conduct fieldwork only within a short time frame from mid-August to mid-September, between the thaw of old snow and the arrival of new.
wrong way (Score:3)
You're looking the wrong direction
so long (Score:2)
and thanks for all the fish!
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We can but it will be a worse overall world, at least in theory.
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A: Humans can't live in a world that is warmer
B: Ice retreats revealing ancient humans that lived during that warmer time
A: Fuck off
Are you aware of the fact that stuff sinks into the ground over time due to gravity, and also weather and erosion puts new dirt and snow on top of it?
All the ancient ruins and artifacts that people dig up, or Dinosaur bones for that matter, they weren't that deep to begin with. Stuff sinks into the ground over time.
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No, you just deliberately misunderstand what I say so that it fits your agenda.
Otzi was revealed by retreating glaciers, that doesn't mean there were no glaciers then. It means that he was walking on top of it and sunk into them over millenia. The article states that he was dressed for the cold with several layers of furs. So it clearly wasn't warm and cozy where he was walking.
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What utter nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Ice melts, stuff frozen in said ice, melts. There's no air-con in the cold bits of the world. One has to agree that the ice is melting faster than it was previously.
Politicians mouthing platitudes ain't going to fix it.
PS Boris is a twat!
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These are the "related links"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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640 Richard Stallman's Return Denounced by the EFF, Tor Project, Mozilla, and the Creator of Rust
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Has it honestly not occurred to you that climate scientists are fully aware of all this? It's their job to know these things, after all. And yet they still say climate change is real, and really a problem.
This is the point when you ask not "what are they missing", but "what am *I* missing".
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NOT ONCE did anyone stop and say, "hey, how was it warm enough thousands of years ago, to support a community settlement all the way up here in the artic".
A lot of people said that at the time fwiw.
Re: but but but (Score:2)
Continental Drift.
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In the middle [nsidc.org] of which 20th century was that again?
well that's one way to put it (Score:1, Troll)
...another could be 'we have a tidal wave of new discoveries that but for melting, we'd never have found'.
You know the earth's climate was NEVER going to stay this way, right?
We can argue all day long about the pace of climate change but climate on earth has never been 'stable' unless one surpremely cherry-picks the data points.
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on earth has never been 'stable' unless one surpremely cherry-picks the data points.
However most of the time it was "stable" during the typical human lifespan.
Now it is not.
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Regardless, it is clear that 5300 years ago there must not have been thick alpine glaciers in Europe, and 3400 years ago the Arctic Circle was far more pleasant. Ergo, during
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Regardless, it is clear that 5300 years ago there must not have been thick alpine glaciers in Europe, and 3400 years ago the Arctic Circle was far more pleasant. Ergo, during the course of human history it has been far warmer and grown much colder.
Your numbers are way off. And have btw nothing to do with "the length of a human life span", anyway. No idea how you come to the odd conclusion that during the previous 10,000 years it once was warmer than right now. It is completely wrong. Sorry.
like the medieva
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No, firstly because "climate" isn't resolvable to that short of timeframes.
If someone is asserting the "climate" is changing based on 20 years of data, that's not climate, that's weather.
Based on your subsequent posts, you seem to think anecdotal personal data is meaningful. It isn't.
I can relate how when I was a kid, I would go swimming and they posted the temperatures on a blackboard at the end of the pool - I recall many times the summer day temp here in MN was over 38C, now that almost never happens.
S
proto-Oxford (Score:2)
I read proto-Oxford and thought "Wait, Oxford what? They can't possibly mean Oxford shirt lol." But then Oxford shoes is even weirder.
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Nothing is more satisfactory then a well-made pair of shiny black Oxford Wingtips.
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I thought they meant some sort of encyclopedia
The future (Score:2)
But all history.... (Score:1, Funny)
was written by white euroean males to oppress the multi-gendered muti-ethnic underclaass, and should therefore be discarded! That it is the lession of Marxist based Crittical and Critical Race Theory, how could we doubt that the erosion of all theory will benefit the oppressed underclasses of women, blacks, transgender, and other nations which imprision and execute people for being female or gay?