All posts by Archaeology World Team

GUATEMALA, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Guatemalan family uncovers ancient Mayan murals on their kitchen walls during a home renovation

Guatemalan family uncovers ancient Mayan murals on their kitchen walls during a home renovation

Home renovations in a Guatemalan mountain village in 2003 unearthed “unparalleled” Maya murals, according to researchers. Now, reports broadcast network RT, a new analysis published in the journal Antiquity has revealed additional insights on the wall paintings, which date to the 17th or 18th century and blend Spanish colonial influences with local indigenous culture.

Lucas Asicona Ramirez, right, discovered the centuries-old paintings after he started chipping away at the plaster in the kitchen of his house.

Local historian and study co-author Lucas Asicona Ramírez found the murals while renovating his kitchen in Chajul, a rural town in Guatemala’s highlands, reported Mike McDonald for Reuters in 2012.

Several houses in Chajul, including Asicona’s, date to the colonial era (1524 to 1821); other locals have discovered similarly historic artworks behind the plaster in their homes.

The Ramirez home is located in the impoverished town of Chajul, Guatemala.
Researchers work to preserve the Maya wall paintings inside the Chajul home.

The majority of Guatemala’s colonial-era murals are found in houses of worship. Centered on Christian themes, these religious artworks were used by the Spanish to assert their dominance over the Maya people, writes Tom Fish for Express. In contrast, the Chajul wall paintings appear inside private homes—and, most tellingly, contain distinct flourishes of indigenous culture.

“We consider these murals to be very unique,” Ivonne Putzeys, an archaeologist at the University of Guatemala in San Carlos, told Reuters. “It’s a tangible heritage that represents [s] real scenes from history.”

In 2015, an international team of researchers started preserving and studying the murals in collaboration with a Maya community indigenous to Guatemala: the Ixil. This group formed the bulk of the roughly 200,000 people killed during the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.

As the experts write in the paper, conducting interviews and consultations with the Ixil was essential to understanding the art’s cultural context.

Many of the friezes feature dancers and musicians. Jaroslaw Źrałka, an archaeologist at Jagiellonian University and first author of the new study, tells Ancient Origins’ Ed Whelan that dance played an important role in the Maya civilization, both recording and relaying history and cultural practices. The dance was so important to the Maya that Spanish missionaries used it as a conversion tool, says Źrałka.

Through interviews with the Chajul Ixil community, the researchers were able to identify specific murals as depictions of known dances from the colonial era.

A mural of ancient vessels adorns the wall next to the family’s stove.

One mural shows tall, bearded conquistadors playing drums as they encounter a dancer dressed in a traditional feathered costume. This scene may illustrate the Dance of the Conquest, which details Spain’s invasion and attempts to convert the Maya to Christianity.

Another mural may show the Dance of the Moors and the Christians. Introduced by the Spaniards, this performance tells the story of Spain’s seizure of lands occupied by Muslim kingdoms, according to Express.

The researchers note that the wall art may also feature dances now lost to history. Many were forgotten when the government prohibited the performance of indigenous dances in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Chemical analysis of the paintings revealed the use of natural clay pigments typical in Maya art, suggesting the murals were indeed created by indigenous artists, reports Ancient Origins. The artworks’ style hews closely to local traditions, showing few signs of foreign influences.

The researchers suggest that the houses in which the murals were found once belonged to key community members—perhaps members of what was known as the cofradías, or brotherhood.

These groups organized religious events connected to both Christian and pre-Hispanic Maya traditions. The houses featuring the friezes may have served as meeting places or venues for rituals and dances.

Per the paper, the murals’ blending of Maya and European imagery could mean that local culture, as revived by the cofradías, was making a defiant comeback as Spain’s influence and control over the region faded.

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

Over 40 ancient shipwrecks discovered in the Black Sea

Over 40 ancient shipwrecks discovered in the Black Sea

Marco Polo himself may have recognised this medieval trading ship. It’s one of the 40 or so shipwrecks newly discovered on the bed of the Black Sea north of Turkey. Some of these vessels sank when the Byzantine Empire was in its heyday 1000 years ago, and some during more recent Ottoman times.

Others sank in the 13th century when Marco Polo was plying his trade across the globe. Most other wrecks from these time periods have been found in much shallower waters, where they have been eaten away down to just their hulls.

But the new haul was preserved for centuries on the seabed thanks to low-oxygen conditions that prevent the decay of timber. As a result, the architecture of the upper deck appears in unprecedented detail, allowing historians to see how well the features match up to historical accounts.

New images show finely carved rudders, masts, tillers, and even ropes that are almost perfectly preserved.

They were rediscovered by submersibles scouring the seabed as part of a project to piece together how and when sea levels rose again in the Black Sea following the last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago.

Over 40 ancient shipwrecks discovered in the Black Sea

The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project has uncovered 41 wrecks this year so far, revealing them in all their glory thanks to a state-of-the-art imagery method called 3D photogrammetry.

“We took thousands of high-quality stills and video around the whole of each wreck,” explains Jon Adams at the University of Southampton, UK, and principal investigator on the project. “Software calculates the positions of millions of points in 3D space, generating accurate, detailed 3D images of each wreck.”

Well-preserved

Adams says that the medieval ships have never been seen in such a well-preserved state. “We’ve never seen them this complete,” he says. “Normally, it’s just bits of the lower hull, but here we have much upper-deck material.”

One of the medieval ships – found 1100 metres down – was probably an Italian trading craft from around the 1300s, of a type that Marco Polo would recognise. Although its iron-fastened hull planks have fallen to the seabed, it retains the stern platform with its rudders intact.

“The mast is also still standing, with the yardarms lying on the deck,” he says. “We can still see rigging and pots on board.”

It also has features of more ancient ship technology, such as “quarter rudders” on each flank at the ship’s rear for steering, rather than the single centre-line stern rudder that became the norm in around 1400 and beyond.

Other wrecks were also beautifully preserved. An Ottoman trading ship from a few centuries later retained many deck features, including masts. In addition, images show a beautifully carved tiller with coils of rope hanging from the timbers at the ship’s rear.

Because they all sank far out at sea, Adams believes that these were trading ships rather than ships sunk in battle. “They’re all a long way offshore, so they were probably overwhelmed by rough weather,” he says.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Munigua, a hidden Roman city in the Sevilla sierra, spain

Munigua, a hidden Roman city in the Sevilla sierra, spain

There is no shortage of Roman ruins in Spain. Some are in the middle of modern city centres, such as Mérida’s theatre and amphitheatre, in Extremadura. Or Itálica, which is reachable by bus from Seville. Others are out in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a track, in a random field. This was the case with Munigua, making it a reasonable option to explore in the middle of a pandemic.

Western Wall of the Sanctuary

The story of Munigua

For centuries it was taken for granted that the temple must have been an ancient castle, abandoned after some old war. Only recently, when the Roman inscriptions appeared, the scholars realized that they were dealing with a Roman temple.

But this temple is way too big for the size of the city. We do not know to which deity it was dedicated. Given its enormous size, it must have been a significant Iberian god or goddess. 

Munigua was founded in the III century BCE before Romans came. But let’s not lose hope: excavations have been going on for over 60 years, so sooner or later we will know!

The Romans took over the Iberian city because it was located close to very rich mines. But alas, an earthquake destroyed the town in the III century ADE, and it was never rebuilt.

Eastern slope of the site with private and public buildings

The mines had been worn out already, and the city was far away from everything. Some people stayed there to live, especially the Moorish. In Munigua, you can actually see the oldest Moorish tombs in Spain. But it was not an important city anymore. In the XII century, it was definitely abandoned.  

Since then, people simply have forgotten that once upon a time, there had been a whole city right in this spot. This is how you find Munigua today: in the middle of the same landscape that the Romans knew -wild, unique, still full of mysteries. 

The visit to Munigua

If you plan to go to Munigua, make sure that the weather conditions are right. If it is raining, it will not be opened. On the bright side, the entrance is free.

Bring your drinks and food -there are no shops there. Think of this visit as if you went for a hike to the mountains! Do not forget solar protection -it is Sevilla, so it will be most likely sunny – and comfortable shoes -after all, you are going to walk at least 6 km!

Temple of the Podium

There are few cities in Spain like Munigua. You get to walk around its ancient streets and get inside the very well preserved buildings. The shovels of the archaeologists have dug out thermae, big houses, a forum, temples, some parts of the ancient city wall.

The funny thing about this one… it was never ended. Also, it went through the two necropoleis of the town, which was very strange for a Roman city: the dead people were always left outside. Same thing with the main temple, at the top of the hill: its architecture in terraces is very atypical in the Roman world. 

The whole city is built indeed on terraces, with stairs going in all directions, like big chaos, very unlike the civilized Roman order. We can only assume that the previous Iberian inhabitants never entirely left!

CANADA, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

The Arctic Could Turn Green and Free of Ice Like it was 125,000 Years Ago

The Arctic Could Turn Green and Free of Ice Like it was 125,000 Years Ago

Researchers analyzed plant DNA more than 100,000 years old retrieved from lake sediment in the Arctic (the oldest DNA in lake sediment analyzed in a publication to date) and found evidence of a shrub native to northern Canadian ecosystems 250 miles (400 km) farther north than its current range.

As the Arctic warms much faster than everywhere else on the planet in response to climate change, the findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may not only be a glimpse of the past but a snapshot of our potential future.

“We have this really rare view into a particularly warm period in the past that was arguably the most recent time that it was warmer than present in the Arctic. That makes it a really useful analogue for what we might expect in the future,” said Sarah Crump, who conducted the work as a Ph.D. student in geological sciences and then a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR).

To gain this glimpse back in time, the researchers not only analyzed DNA samples, they first had to journey to a remote region of the Arctic by ATV and snowmobile to gather them and bring them back.

Dwarf birch is a key species of the low Arctic tundra, where slightly taller shrubs (reaching a person’s knees) can grow in an otherwise cold and inhospitable environment. But dwarf birch doesn’t currently survive past the southern part of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Yet researchers found DNA of this plant in the ancient lake sediment showing it used to grow much farther north.

“It’s a pretty significant difference from the distribution of tundra plants today,” said Crump, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Paleogenomics Lab at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Tundra Plants

While there are many potential ecological effects of the dwarf birch creeping farther north, Crump and her colleagues examined the climate feedbacks related to these shrubs covering more of the Arctic. Many climate models don’t include these kinds of changes in vegetation, yet these taller shrubs can stick out above snow in the spring and fall, making the Earth’s surface dark green instead of white — causing it to absorb more heat from the sun.

“It’s a temperature feedback similar to sea ice loss,” said Crump. During the last interglacial period, between 116,000 and 125,000 years ago, these plants had thousands of years to adjust and move in response to warmer temperatures. With today’s rapid rate of warming, the vegetation is likely not keeping pace, but that doesn’t mean it won’t play an important role in impacting everything from thawing permafrost to melting glaciers and sea-level rise.

“As we think about how landscapes will equilibrate to current warming, it’s really important that we account for how these plant ranges are going to change,” said Crump.

As the Arctic could easily see an increase of 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels by 2100, the same temperature it was in the last interglacial period, these findings can help us better understand how our landscapes might change as the Arctic is on track to again reach these ancient temperatures by the end of the century.

Mud as a microscope

To get the ancient DNA they wanted, the researchers couldn’t look to the ocean or to the land — they had to look in a lake. Baffin Island is located on the northeastern side of Arctic Canada, kitty-corner to Greenland, in the territory of Nunavut and the lands of the Qikiqtaani Inuit. It’s the largest island in Canada and the fifth-largest island in the world, with a mountain range that runs along its northeastern edge. But these scientists were interested in a small lake, past the mountains and near the coast.

Above the Arctic Circle, the area around this lake is typical of a high Arctic tundra, with average annual temperatures below 15 °F (?9.5 °C). In this inhospitable climate, the soil is thin and not much of anything grows.

But DNA stored in the lake beds below tells a much different story. To reach this valuable resource, Crump and her fellow researchers carefully balanced on cheap inflatable boats in the summer — the only vessels light enough to carry with them — and watched out for polar bears from the lake ice in winter. They pierced the thick mud up to 30 feet (10 meters) below its surface with long, cylindrical pipes, hammering them deep into the sediment.

The goal of this precarious feat? To carefully withdraw a vertical history of ancient plant material to then travel back out with and take back to the lab. While some of the mud was analyzed at a state-of-the-art organic geochemistry lab in the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Community (SEEC) at CU Boulder, it also needed to reach a special lab dedicated to decoding ancient DNA, at Curtin University in Perth.

To share their secrets, these mud cores had to travel halfway across the world from the Arctic to Australia.

A local snapshot

Once in the lab, the scientists had to suit up like astronauts and examine the mud in an ultra-clean space to ensure that their own DNA didn’t contaminate that any of their hard-earned samples.

It was a race against the clock.

“Your best shot is getting fresh mud,” said Crump. “Once it’s out of the lake, the DNA is going to start to degrade.”

This is why older lake bed samples in cold storage don’t quite do the trick. While other researchers have also collected and analyzed much older DNA samples from permafrost in the Arctic (which acts as a natural freezer underground), lake sediments are kept cool, but not frozen. With fresher mud and more intact DNA, scientists can get a clearer and more detailed picture of the vegetation which once grew in that immediate area.

Reconstructing historic vegetation has most commonly been done using fossil pollen records, which preserve well in sediment. But pollen is prone to only showing the big picture, as it is easily blown about by the wind and doesn’t stay in one place. The new technique used by Crump and her colleagues allowed them to extract plant DNA directly from the sediment, sequence the DNA, and infer what plant species were living there at the time. Instead of a regional picture, sedimentary DNA analysis gives researchers a local snapshot of the plant species living there at the time. Now that they have shown it’s possible to extract DNA that’s over 100,000 years old, future possibilities abound.

“This tool is going to be really useful on these longer timescales,” said Crump. This research has also planted the seed to study more than just plants. In the DNA samples from their lake sediment, there are signals from a whole range of organisms that lived in and around the lake.

“We’re just starting to scratch the surface of what we’re able to see in these past ecosystems,” said Crump. “We can see the past presence of everything from microbes to mammals, and we can start to get much broader pictures of how past ecosystems looked and how they functioned.”

EUROPE, POLAND, WORLD

Researchers Map World War II Bomb Craters in Poland

Researchers Map World War II Bomb Craters in Poland

According to a Live Science report, Maria Fajer of the University of Silesia and her colleagues employed lidar technology to record some 6,000 bomb craters in the Koźle Basin, an area of forests and wetlands in southern Poland that was part of Germany during World War II.

Lidar scans revealed thousands of craters in Poland's Koźle Basin, remnants of intense Allied bombings during 1943 and 1944.
Lidar scans revealed thousands of craters in Poland’s Koźle Basin, remnants of intense Allied bombings during 1943 and 1944.

Researchers recently mapped and analyzed the deeply scarred landscape for the first time, counting around 6,000 bomb craters ranging from 16 to 49 feet (5 to 15 meters) in diameter. Some areas held as many as 30 craters in a single hectare (10,000 square meters).

Their investigation presents a grim picture of the damage sustained by the battle-torn terrain, known as the Koźle Basin. But it also offers a glimpse of how the craters have since become an important part of the basin’s natural landscape and ecosystems, the scientists reported in a new study.

The Koźle Basin covers an area of approximately 180 square miles (470 square kilometers). Within the basin, extending for about 60 square miles (150 square km), “there are clusters of remnants of the Allied air campaign conducted there in the second half of 1944,” said study author Maria Fajer, a geomorphology researcher with the Faculty of Earth Sciences at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.

“These are variously preserved bomb craters, ranging from those that are very well visible in the field to traces of backfilled and reclaimed craters,” Fajer told Live Science in an email. 

Nazi Germany controlled the Koźle Basin during WWII and used the region for industrial fuel production. It was the biggest such site in the entire Third Reich, the scientists reported. Coal and water were easily accessible there, while dense forests and sheltering hills provided natural cover from air and ground attacks.

Because the basin’s topography trapped air masses, the Germans could add another layer of protection to their operation by producing thick anti-aircraft smoke screens.

Great Britain’s Royal Air Force began targeting the region for the bombing in February 1943, and in June 1944 Americans and British pilots prioritized the destruction of Nazi oil refineries, as well as fuel and chemical factories.

Wartime records describe Allied planes dropping a total of 39,137 bombs in the Koźle Basin. Most of these were delayed-action bombs that were “intended for the destruction of buildings, reinforced concrete, and metal structures, as well as land-cratering,” the scientists reported March 16 in the journal Antiquity.

Uncounted numbers of craters were scoured away during postwar construction and agriculture, and researchers decided to map the region before more evidence of this noteworthy wartime bombardment was lost forever, according to the study. 

Allied planes targeted Nazi industrial factories in the Koźle Basin with tens of thousands of bombs.

Scanning with lasers

The researchers deployed a remote sensing method called light detection and ranging, or lidar, which uses laser pulses to peer through vegetation and reveal features in the ground.

By examining the sizes, shapes, and distribution of thousands of craters, the researchers were able to piece together a picture of the types of bombs that were used; how many were dropped at the same time; and ground conditions at the time of impact.

Today, these craters “are relics that document important historical events, and that constitutes a link between the area and the battlefields of Europe and beyond,” the study authors wrote. In the 75 years that have passed since the war, these remnants of violent explosions have gradually become part of the forest habitat.

“They now represent places where many amphibian, reptile, insect, bird, and ungulate species reside, seek shelter, or breed. The craters also provide habitats for numerous plant species,” the study authors wrote.

“The many water bodies and marshes that formed in the bomb craters contribute to the diversification and enrichment of local ecosystems, where sandy soils dominate.” 

Many species of animals and plants now make their homes in and around the Koźle Basin craters.

Follow-up studies by the scientists will further explore the ecological role of craters in forest ecosystems and the threats posed by unexploded bombs, Fajer said.

In the decades since WWII, natural processes such as erosion have erased many of the craters, while industry, farming, and other human activities could wipe away still more. Mapping the bomb fields will therefore help to preserve a record of WWII devastation before it vanishes. 

The researchers also argue that locations marred by WWII devastation, such as the still-scarred Koźle Basin, should be conserved for future generations. These areas “should be covered by special heritage protection measures to help us remember the consequences of the bad decisions that led to the war,” Fajer said.

EUROPE, POLAND, WORLD

Toothpick Use Identified on Neanderthal Tooth from Poland

Toothpick Use Identified on Neanderthal Tooth from Poland

Additional evidence of Neanderthal hygiene practices has been unearthed at Stajnia Cave, which is located in south-central Poland, according to a Science in Poland report. 

Analyzing two teeth excavated from the Pleistocene layers of the Stajnia Cave (Kraków-Częstochowa Upland), the team led by Dr. Wioletta Nowaczewska from the Department of Human Biology, University of Wrocław, found traces left by a toothpick.

She said: “It appears that the owner of the tooth used oral hygiene. Probably between the last two teeth, there were food residues that had to be removed. We don’t know what he made a toothpick from – a piece of a twig, a piece of bone, or fishbone. It had to be a fairly stiff, cylindrical object, which the individual used often enough to leave a clear trace.”

Toothpick Use Identified on Neanderthal Tooth from Poland

This is the second known example of such hygienic procedures being practiced by Neanderthals from Stajnia Cave. Similar traces have been preserved on another tooth found earlier in the cave.

Scientists also believe that the teeth, a wisdom tooth (third lower molar) and an upper premolar, belonged to an individual over 30 years old, and the other to a slightly younger male in his twenties. 

However, they found no pathological changes indicative of enamel growth disorders, hypoplasia, or caries. They note that the wisdom tooth shows signs of severe wear, which may be related to eating hard food.

To determine whether the tooth belonged to our immediate ancestor (Homo sapiens) or a fossil relative (Homo neanderthalensis), scientists assessed the structure of the tooth’s crown, enamel thickness, dentine surface contour, and crown surface microtrauma. 

They compared the data with other data on the teeth of Neanderthals, as well as fossil and contemporary representatives of our species. 

Dr. Nowaczewska said: “A set of features, i.e. the presence of a specific combination of features characteristic of Neanderthals indicates that further teeth from Stajnia Cave belonged to them. In the case of the lower molar, one can see a complicated structure: a large number of tubercles. In the front part of the crown, there was also a characteristic depression and enamel formation. 

“The good condition of the premolar allowed us to carry out 2D and 3D analysis of enamel thickness, digital reconstruction, virtual ‘pulling’ of the enamel cap and assessment of enamel thickness, which in Neanderthals is thinner than in H. sapiens. All these features taken together point to Neanderthals.”

The teeth were initially discovered in 2010 along with numerous remains of the fauna during excavation works conducted under the supervision of Dr. Mikołaj Urbanowski.

But it is only recently that they have been analyzed using mitochondrial DNA. Dr. Mateja Hajdinjak from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology the tests along with additional analyses to confirm that the teeth belonged to Neanderthals.

Neanderthal bone remains are rare finds in Central and Eastern Europe (there are slightly more sites related to Neanderthal tools). In today’s Poland, such finds accumulate in the south; northern Poland remained within the reach of the glacier for a long time and the conditions for survival were difficult. 

Officially confirmed discoveries are few and small in size: four teeth. Three of them were also discovered in Stajnia Cave, one in Ciemna Cave (also in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland).

Dr. Nowaczewska believes that this is not the end of the discoveries in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland. She said: “When I look at these areas as a palaeoanthropologist, I have the impression that time stands still there… If there are still any Neanderthal bone remains to be found, the search should focus on the Upland and other southern sites. Due to the then climatic conditions, this was the area with the best living conditions.”

The study was carried out by scientists from the University of Wrocław and the University of Silesia, the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Geological Institute, the University of Bologna (Italy), the Natural History Museum in London (Great Britain), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Germany). The results were presented in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Virtual tooth models were prepared by Dr. Marcin Binkowski from the University of Silesia, with the technical support of Michał Walczak and Martyna Czaja, as well as Professor Stefano Benazzi and Antonino Vazzana from the University of Bologna.

EUROPE, GREENLAND, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Scientists stunned to discover plants beneath mile-deep Greenland ice

Scientists stunned to discover plants beneath mile-deep Greenland ice

In northwestern Greenland in 1966, US Army scientists drilled through nearly a mile of ice and pulled up a fifteen-foot-long tube of dirt from the bottom. Then this frozen sediment was lost in a freezer for decades. It was accidentally rediscovered in 2017.

Engineers with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory capture part of an ice core at Camp Century, Greenland, circa 1966.

In 2019, University of Vermont scientist Andrew Christ looked at it through his microscope — and couldn’t believe what he was seeing: twigs and leaves instead of just sand and rock. That suggested that the ice was gone in the recent geologic past — and that a vegetated landscape, perhaps a boreal forest, stood where a mile-deep ice sheet as big as Alaska stands today.

Over the last year, Christ and an international team of scientists — led by Paul Bierman at UVM, Joerg Schaefer at Columbia University, and Dorthe Dahl-Jensen at the University of Copenhagen — have studied these one-of-a-kind fossil plants and sediment from the bottom of Greenland. Their results show that most, or all, of Greenland, must have been ice-free within the last million years, perhaps even the last few hundred thousand years.

Greenland

“Ice sheets typically pulverize and destroy everything in their path,” says Christ, “but what we discovered was delicate plant structures — perfectly preserved. They’re fossils, but they look like they died yesterday. It’s a time capsule of what used to live on Greenland that we wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.”

The discovery helps confirm a new and troubling understanding that the Greenland ice has melted off entirely during recent warm periods in Earth’s history — periods like the one we are now creating with human-caused climate change.

Understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet in the past is critical for predicting how it will respond to climate warming in the future and how quickly it will melt. Since some twenty feet of sea-level rise is tied up in Greenland’s ice, every coastal city in the world is at risk. The new study provides the strongest evidence yet that Greenland is more fragile and sensitive to climate change than previously understood — and at grave risk of irreversibly melting off.

“This is not a twenty-generation problem,” says Paul Bierman, a geoscientist at UVM in the College of Arts & Sciences, Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources, and fellow in the Gund Institute for Environment. “This is an urgent problem for the next 50 years.”

The new research was published March 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Beneath the Ice

The material for the new PNAS study came from Camp Century, a Cold War military base dug inside the ice sheet far above the Arctic Circle in the 1960s. The real purpose of the camp was a super-secret effort, called Project Iceworm, to hide 600 nuclear missiles under the ice close to the Soviet Union. As a cover, the Army presented the camp as a polar science station.

A sediment sample from the Camp Century core site.

The military mission failed, but the science team did complete important research, including drilling a 4560-foot-deep ice core. The Camp Century scientists were focused on the ice itself — part of the burgeoning effort at the time to understand the deep history of Earth’s ice ages. They, apparently, took less interest in a bit of dirt gathered from beneath the ice core. Then, in a truly cinematic set of strange plot twists, the ice core was moved from an Army freezer to the University of Buffalo in the 1970s, to another freezer in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the 1990s, where it languished for decades — until it surfaced when the cores were being moved to a new freezer.

For much of the Pleistocene — the icy period covering the last 2.6 million years — portions of the ice on Greenland persisted even during warmer spells called “interglacials.” But most of this general story has been pieced together from indirect evidence in mud and rock that washed off the island and was gathered by offshore ocean drilling. The extent of Greenland’s ice sheet and what kinds of ecosystems existed there before the last interglacial warm period — that ended about 120,000 years ago — have been hotly debated and poorly understood.

The new study makes clear that the deep ice at Camp Century — some 75 miles inland from the coast and only 800 miles from the North Pole — entirely melted at least once within the last million years and was covered with vegetation, including moss and perhaps trees. The new research, supported by the National Science Foundation, lines up with data from two other ice cores from the center of Greenland, collected in the 1990s. Sediment from the bottom of these cores also indicates that the ice sheet was gone for some time in the recent geologic past.

Scientists stunned to discover plants beneath mile-deep Greenland ice
Most of Greenland is covered with ice today. But a new study shows that the deep ice at a site called Camp Century in northwestern Greenland entirely melted at least once within the last million years. The research suggests that the landscape may have instead been covered with green tundra, perhaps like this view of eastern Greenland, near the ocean.

The combination of these cores from the center of Greenland with the new insight from Camp Century in the far northwest gives researchers an unprecedented view of the shifting fate of the entire Greenland ice sheet.

The team of scientists used a series of advanced analytical techniques — none of which were available to researchers fifty years ago — to probe the sediment, fossils, and the waxy coating of leaves found at the bottom of the Camp Century ice core. For example, they measured ratios of rare forms — isotopes — of both aluminum and the element beryllium that form in quartz only when the ground is exposed to the sky and can be hit by cosmic rays. These ratios gave the scientists a window into how long rocks at the surface were exposed vs. buried under layers of ice. This analysis gives the scientists a kind of clock for measuring what was happening in Greenland in the past.

Another test used rare forms of oxygen, found in the ice within the sediment, to reveal that precipitation must have fallen at much lower elevations than the height of the current ice sheet, “demonstrating ice sheet absence,” the team writes.

Combining these techniques with studies of luminescence that estimate the amount of time since sediment was exposed to light, radiocarbon-dating of bits of wood in the ice, and analysis of how layers of ice and debris were arranged — allowed the team to be clear that most, if not all, of Greenland, melted at least once during the past million years — making Greenland green with moss and lichen, and perhaps with spruce and fir trees.

And the new study shows that ecosystems of the past were not scoured into oblivion by ages of glaciers and ice sheets bulldozing overtop. Instead, the story of these living landscapes remains captured under the relatively young ice that formed on top of the ground, frozen in place, and holds them still.

In a 1960’s movie about Camp Century created by the Army, the narrator notes that “more than ninety percent of Greenland is permanently frozen under a polar ice cap.” This new study makes clear that it’s not as permanent as we once thought. “Our study shows that Greenland is much more sensitive to natural climate warming than we used to think — and we already know that humanity’s out-of-control warming of the planet hugely exceeds the natural rate,” says Christ.

“Greenland may seem far away,” says UVM’s Paul Bierman, “but it can quickly melt, pouring enough into the oceans that New York, Miami, Dhaka — pick your city — will go underwater.”

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

An 8,000-Year-Old Platform in Britain Could be the Oldest Boat-building site Ever

An 8,000-Year-Old Platform in Britain Could be the Oldest Boat-building site Ever

The Maritime Archaeological Trust has discovered a new 8,000-year-old structure next to what is believed to be the oldest boat building site in the world on the Isle of Wight.

Director of the Maritime Archaeological Trust, Garry Momber, said: “This new discovery is particularly important as the wooden platform is part of a site that doubles the amount of worked wood found in the UK from a period that lasted 5,500 years.”

The site lies east of Yarmouth, and the new platform is the most intact, wooden Middle Stone Age structure ever found in the UK.

The 8,000-year-old wooden platform following reconstruction.

The site is now 11 meters below sea level and during the period there was human activity on the site, it was dry land with lush vegetation. Importantly, it was at a time before the North Sea was fully formed and the Isle of Wight was still connected to mainland Europe.

The site was first discovered in 2005 and contains an arrangement of trimmed timbers that could be platforms, walkways or collapsed structures.

However, these were difficult to interpret until the Maritime Archaeological Trust used state of the art photogrammetry techniques to record the remains. During the late spring, the new structure was spotted eroding from within the drowned forest.

The first task was to create a 3D digital model of the landscape so it could be experienced by non-divers. It was then excavated by the Maritime Archaeological Trust during the summer and has revealed a cohesive platform consisting of split timbers, several layers thick, resting on horizontally laid round-wood foundations.

An 8,000-Year-Old Platform in Britain Could be the Oldest Boat-building site Ever

Garry continued “The site contains a wealth of evidence for technological skills that were not thought to have been developed for a further couple of thousand years, such as advanced woodworking. This site shows the value of marine archaeology for understanding the development of civilization.

Yet, being underwater, there are no regulations that can protect it. Therefore, it is down to our charity, with the help of our donors, to save it before it is lost forever.”

The Maritime Archaeological Trust is working with the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) to record and study, reconstruct and display the collection of timbers. Many of the wooden artefacts are being stored in the British Ocean Sediment Core Research facility (BOSCORF), operated by the National Oceanography Centre.

As with sediment cores, ancient wood will degrade more quickly if it is not kept in a dark, wet, and cold setting. While being kept cold, dark, and wet, the aim is to remove salt from within wood cells of the timber, allowing it to be analysed and recorded.

This is important because archaeological information, such as cut marks or engravings, are most often found on the surface of the wood and are lost quickly when timber degrades. Once the timbers have been recorded and have desalinated, the wood can be conserved for display.

Dr Suzanne Maclachlan, the curator at BOSCORF, said “It has been really exciting for us to assist the Trust’s work with such unique and historically important artefacts. This is a great example of how the BOSCORF repository is able to support the delivery of a wide range of marine science.”

When diving on the submerged landscape Dan Snow, the history broadcaster and host of History Hit, one of the world’s biggest history podcasts, commented that he was both awestruck by the incredible remains and shocked by the rate of erosion.

Historian Dan Snow inspecting the 8,000-year-old wooden platform off the coast of the Isle of Wight, UK.

This material, coupled with advanced woodworking skills and finely crafted tools suggests a European, Neolithic (New Stone Age) influence. The problem is that it is all being lost. As the Solent evolves, sections of the ancient land surface are being eroded by up to half a metre per year and the archaeological evidence is disappearing.

Research in 2019 was funded by the Scorpion Trust, the Butley Research Group, the Edward Fort Foundation, and the Maritime Archaeology Trust. Work was conducted with the help of volunteers and many individuals who gave their time and often money, to ensure the material was recovered successfully.