From Eco Watch:
Global heating from the climate crisis is rapidly melting glaciers, revealing treasures underneath the ice from long ago. Retreating ice in Norway recently revealed a lost Viking mountain pass strewn with artifacts, according to a new study in the journal Antiquity.
The first discovery was an 1,800 year-old shirt, which spurred researchers to find what else was strewn around near the Lendbreen ice patch outside the alpine village of Lom, Norway. That led to an exploration that uncovered artifacts dating back to the late Roman Iron Age all the way to the Viking Age and the medieval period, as Scientific American reported.
When the researchers traipsed into the abandoned mountain pass that is rapidly melting due to warmer global temperatures, they found broken sleds, tools and other elements of daily life dating back nearly 2,000 years, as National Geographic reported...
They found nearly 1,000 artifacts that run the gamut from 300 to 1500 AD, with the mountain pass falling out of use after the Black Death in the medieval period. The researchers used carbon dating to pinpoint when each finding is from. The bulk of what they collected comes from the period around 1000 AD at the height of the Viking era when trade and mobility in the region peaked, according to The Guardian.
"A lost mountain pass melting out of the ice is a dream discovery for us glacial archaeologists," said Pilø in a statement, as CNN reported. "In such passes, past travelers left behind lots of artifacts, frozen in time by the ice..."
"Oh no", thinks the unsuspecting reader, "we're all going to drown".
Or are we?
The finds actually remind us that there was a Roman Warm Period and a Mediæval Warm Period (referred to here as 'the Viking era'), when the pass was relatively ice-free and in regular use. They didn't magically drop stuff under the ice, they dropped stuff and the ice then formed and covered it. Which is why the oldest finds are from the RWP and most are from the MWP:
The first discovery was an 1,800 year-old shirt... That led to an exploration that uncovered artifacts dating back to the late Roman Iron Age...
The bulk of what they collected comes from the period around 1000 AD at the height of the Viking era when trade and mobility in the region peaked... with the mountain pass falling out of use after the Black Death in the medieval period.
Now we are in the Modern Warm Period (they seem to come along every thousand years or so) and the ice has retreated to where it was during the earlier warm periods. The Black Death happened around the same time as (and was possibly caused by) the end of the MWP and the onset of the Little Ice Age.
H/t Ben Pile
Debate Magazine
