As Planet Warms, Resurfaced Relics Threatened

An old wooden shipwreck in Tisnes, near Tromsø, Norway.

Climate change and its various effects, from melting polar ice and thawing permafrost to rising sea levels and violent storms, are exposing ancient relics and remains at an increasing rate across the planet, threatening them with rapid deterioration and endangering a major source of our knowledge about the past.

New Scientist reports that some archaeologists are so alarmed about the damage being done to these materials by global warming that they're urging colleagues to step away from their excavation sites and rush to preserve the suddenly-revealed specimens.

The destruction, ironically, is coming at a time when scientists have recently-developed techniques--ranging from sequencing of ancient DNA to chemical analysis of tooth plaque that shed insights about an ancient human's diet--that would provide us with a wealth of information about antiquity.

"The archive is being destroyed just as we are able to read it," Thomas McGovern, an archaeologist at the City University of New York, told New Scientist.

In once-frozen areas of the northern hemisphere, melting glaciers are exposing frozen remains of ancient humans and animals faster than researchers can recover them, Scientific American reported in 2015.

To the south,when archaeologists uncover mummies from the Chinchorro civilization, which existed 7,000 years ago in northern Chile and Peru, they're finding signs of increasingly rapid deterioration, as the climate in that region has become increasingly moist, according to a 2015 Los Angeles Times article.

Some scientists also are taking advantage of opportunities for finds created by climate change. According to New Scientist, receding sea ice around Norway's Svalbard archipelago has opened up previously inaccessible areas, allowing marine archaeologist Øyvind Ødegård to search for shipwrecks in the area that date back to the late 1500s.

Even so, Ødegård reportedly was alarmed to discover a piece of driftwood in the area that was infested with shipworm, a voracious wood-consuming mollusc, which previously was thought to be unknown in the waters because it was too cold. If shipworm has invaded the waters due to climate shifts, it could pose a threat to the wrecks that haven't yet been investigated.

From Discovery News