Climate change has been helpful for at least one group – archeologists:
The summer of 2003 was the hottest in Europe for 500 years. On the remote Schnidejoch pass, 2,750 meters above sea level in the Swiss Alps, an ice patch shrank by half its volume, leaving a wooden object high and dry. When hiker Ursula Leuenberger came across it, she realized it had no business there, so far above the tree line, so she picked it up and handed it over to the local archaeological service. It turned out to be part of a Neolithic arrow quiver, almost 5,000 years old. Since then, archaeologists have found more than 800 artifacts in the vicinity of the pass. …
Glacier archaeology, as the field is called, has been referred to as the silver lining in the cloud of global warming. Like underwater archaeology, it is exposing a dimension of humanity’s past that had been almost entirely neglected; one that has the potential to profoundly influence our understanding of our ancestors. But it is a race against time. As soon as organic material melts out of the preserving ice and is exposed to the elements again, it starts to decay. “It’s like this glimpse into a freezer that’s been left open for a couple of weeks,” says Craig Lee at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “You might find a few jars of fruit that are still viable, but the rest is gone.” The sheer amount of material now in this precarious condition – Swiss glaciers, for example, have lost a third of their volume since 1860 – means that archaeologists simply cannot reach it all in time, not least because it is often inaccessible outside the narrow window of summer at these altitudes. It’s a case of triage, says Lee.
The Dish 