Norway's melting ice is giving up 6,000-year-old Stone Age arrows
The oldest ice disappears and the Stone Age emerges from it
For 20 years, the Secrets of the Ice team has pulled Viking Age finds from mountain ice patches in Innlandet, Norway. Now the oldest ice is vanishing, and far older objects are surfacing: this season alone brought 48 prehistoric arrows, including slate, bone, and mussel-shell arrowheads up to 6,000 years old. Espen Finstad says most of the artifact-bearing ice could be gone within 20 years.
There has been ice here for 6,000–7,000 years. Nature has been warning us and sending signals for many years. But now it's giving up. Now it is simply going to melt.
- pugworthy
To be clear, so far some of the oldest ice found is over 6 million years old...
https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/six-million-year-old-ice-d...
- autoexec
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!
- assimpleaspossi
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?
- lexicality
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
- chrisco255
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.