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

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.

The artifacts that the archaeologists show me in Lom are the very latest finds, recovered in recent days. On one table there is an arrow shaft with string and some feathers; the fletching is still intact and it is about 1,500 years old. There are arrowheads too — one is carved beautifully from what is almost certainly antler bone. A separate arrow shaft dates back to the Stone Age, perhaps shot at a target, probably a reindeer, some 4,000 years ago. The arrow lay on the mountainside and was covered in snow, where it stayed, untouched and locked in ice — until now.