> To be clear, so far some of the oldest ice found is over 6 million years old...
And they're working on finding even older!
"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"
Sure, our actions and inaction regarding climate change threaten the very future of humanity, but on the bright side we're going to learn so much about human history in the process!
Nah. For centuries up to the 1850s, climate was looking pretty dicy. The little ice age, had it gone on, might have represented a return a big ice age.
The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.
I'm slightly surprised they're just holding these artefacts with bare hands. I thought that was generally a no-no for dealing with objects untouched for thousands of years
Conservationists and archivists (sometimes) use gloves on cleaned samples, but not archaeologists. An archaeologist wearing gloves is almost certainly just cold.
There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.
I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.
> no real reason [...] still coated in whatever was floating around the environment
I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archive pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases?
Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for DNA?"? At what point in automated lab tech progress, does "handled, dusted, washed, shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we increased access using dynamite"?
So this means these areas were once not ice covered? Does this mean the area is returning to what it was a thousand years ago? And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?
What's most impressive to me is how razor sharp the slate arrowhead they show in the top photo is. I've seen photos of many stone age arrowheads but they are usually much more dull and blunted.
That's because they weren't exposed to the weather as much. Essentially these were 'shrinkwrapped' in nature's own version of Cosmoline. No bacteria, no free oxygen. Once did this with a rose to see how long it would last and it basically was perfect until we moved house. Many years and not even the slightest change, it didn't even lose color.
Yes: most mainland Norway ice was gone during the holocene climatic optimum (9–6 thousand years ago), and glaciers recovered since then (until approx the 20th century, when deglaciation started accelerating again).
The climate is varying in long cycles, and the deglaciation 20 thousand years ago (last glacial maximum) was driven by a spike in summer temperatures, and this peak has already long passed. Ice ages and interglacial periods have a certain momentum to them, so it takes more than just that to go back to full ice age..
No, it's not wrong or we wouldn't be finding 5K year old instruments underneath melted glaciers as this article's evidence shows. And ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica support this.
Without taking a position I will point out that your stated reasoning doesn't hold due to how much momentum these systems have and how slowly they respond. It seems entirely plausible that this outcome would still have happened if temperatures had plateaued several years ago.
https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/six-million-year-old-ice-d...
And they're working on finding even older!
"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"
AI is in.
The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.
Amazing how humanity keeps lucking out like this.
There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.
I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.
I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archive pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases?
Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for DNA?"? At what point in automated lab tech progress, does "handled, dusted, washed, shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we increased access using dynamite"?
The climate is varying in long cycles, and the deglaciation 20 thousand years ago (last glacial maximum) was driven by a spike in summer temperatures, and this peak has already long passed. Ice ages and interglacial periods have a certain momentum to them, so it takes more than just that to go back to full ice age..