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.
Do you also wait until the inside of the meat is the temperature you want before taking it off the grill, then are later surprised when it is overcooked?
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.
It's not so easy to freeze something that large without getting defects in the crystal due to different rates of freezing, to do that properly will be a major engineering project. But I'd love to see you succeed with that.
That's part of the story. The petroleum based part will go in a few years, what remains is the protective layer of wax that matters. I've bought some military surplus stuff that was coated in it, at first I didn't know what it was and then once I found out about it (and how to remove it) I was super impressed by how effective it is in preserving all kinds of materials from time's teeth. In particular these were parts for a 1940s vehicle, NOS that came out of the covering as though made the other day.
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-archival-conservation pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases? Rather than there's no information there to lose?
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 nanopore DNA?"? Does automated lab tech progress, someday make "brushed, handled, dusted, washed, and shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?
Nowadays they don’t in fact brush off artifacts immediately upon extraction, just clear them of large clumps of dirt. Precisely because the fragile remains of paint and whatever else might have been stuck to them can often teach us more than the artifact itself.
That one notch further on the spectrum that’s being described. Will “clear large chunks of dirt in the field” be found to have damaged information? Is there genuinely nothing to learn from the chunks of dirt? Or is it still too expensive to pay attention?
We can only understand the coarsest information available in the soil. Any particular cubic centimeter has thousands of completely undocumented bacterial taxa, miles of fungal threads, organic residues left behind by higher lifeforms, etc. Each bit of soil is essentially unique.
Moreover, just being in the general vicinity is enough for us to leave behind contamination, since humans (and all other animals) constantly shed detectable eDNA into the environment. And even if they wanted to deal with this complexity, the budget for an entire project's archaeological testing is often less than my coworkers' monthly token budgets. You might get less than a dozen radioisotope, TL, or dendro tests for the entire thing, let alone anything more expensive.
> 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!
A single data center can consume over well over 650 MW which is enough electricity for nearly 500,000 homes, which is more homes than the entire population of Miami Florida. Amazon has a 1,037 MW AI data center.
The main consumers of electricity are industrial, not homes. Nothing we take for granted in a home would exist without those industrial supply chains, including data centers. The homes are downstream of continued investment in and expansion of the processes that actually consume most of the electricity.
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 wonder if there were any climate change alarmists around 20,000 years ago; telling everyone that the planet was doomed if those mile-deep glaciers covering New York ever melted?
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?
> And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
6000 years ago was about the time of the last interglacial period so likely it was ice free at that time.
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
Reading the comments on any sort of environment adjacent news on this website is like a form of self torture. You'd think having access to a large corpus of humanity's written knowledge could help, but it seems like it's making it worse.
I want to believe it's bots pushing propaganda, and not that a non-insignificant portion of HN refuses to believe in climate change. But I really don't know these days.
PowerElectronix | 13 hours ago
throwaway173738 | 12 hours ago
kzrdude | 12 hours ago
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..
chrisco255 | 12 hours ago
mistrial9 | 11 hours ago
chrisco255 | 9 hours ago
fc417fc802 | 9 hours ago
Cerium | 6 hours ago
mikert89 | 12 hours ago
Creamsicle47 | 11 hours ago
taneq | 5 hours ago
gAI | 12 hours ago
octaane | 8 hours ago
chrisco255 | 12 hours ago
jacquesm | 10 hours ago
spockz | 10 hours ago
jacquesm | 7 hours ago
userbinator | 4 hours ago
Ironically it's made of petroleum, which is the decayed remains of prehistoric organisms.
jacquesm | 3 hours ago
faangguyindia | 3 hours ago
lexicality | 12 hours ago
dieselgate | 11 hours ago
AlotOfReading | 11 hours ago
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.
mncharity | 7 hours ago
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-archival-conservation pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases? Rather than there's no information there to lose?
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 nanopore DNA?"? Does automated lab tech progress, someday make "brushed, handled, dusted, washed, and shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?
apothegm | 6 hours ago
narnarpapadaddy | 4 hours ago
AlotOfReading | 4 hours ago
Moreover, just being in the general vicinity is enough for us to leave behind contamination, since humans (and all other animals) constantly shed detectable eDNA into the environment. And even if they wanted to deal with this complexity, the budget for an entire project's archaeological testing is often less than my coworkers' monthly token budgets. You might get less than a dozen radioisotope, TL, or dendro tests for the entire thing, let alone anything more expensive.
thenthenthen | 8 hours ago
bpbp-mango | 11 hours ago
pugworthy | 11 hours ago
https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/six-million-year-old-ice-d...
x______________ | 8 hours ago
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"
pugworthy | 7 hours ago
One of the presentations was on this research, and I was somewhat amazed the new stretch goal is to find 10 million year old ice. More power to them!
autoexec | 10 hours ago
ant6n | 10 hours ago
AI is in.
paulryanrogers | 9 hours ago
SoftTalker | 7 hours ago
paulryanrogers | 7 hours ago
We don't have to be slaves to unregulated markets or the oligarchs they naturally breed.
IrishTechie | 2 hours ago
seb1204 | 6 hours ago
jareklupinski | 9 hours ago
trismus | 9 hours ago
yako21000 | 9 hours ago
autoexec | 6 hours ago
jandrewrogers | 4 hours ago
parineum | 8 hours ago
trismus | 55 minutes ago
Razengan | 6 hours ago
quotemstr | 8 hours ago
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.
didgetmaster | 7 hours ago
skeledrew | 10 hours ago
SoftTalker | 7 hours ago
pestatije | 9 hours ago
assimpleaspossi | 9 hours ago
kadoban | 4 hours ago
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
Turskarama | 3 hours ago
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
Alwayshasbeeb | 17 minutes ago
birdsongs | 11 minutes ago