As Glaciers Retreat, They Give up the Bodies and Artifacts They Swallowed

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/glaciers-retreat-they-give-mummies-and-artifacts-they-swallowed-180955399/?no-ist

By Marissa Fessenden
smithsonian.com
May 27, 2015

The 5,300-year-old body of Ötzi, the Stone Age human dubbed "The Iceman," is perhaps one of the most famous mummies to emerge from ice. But with glaciers around the world melting, many more bodies — some relatively new, others ancient — are now emerging. Global warming is giving back many once thought lost forever.

Take the soldiers who died during "The White War," a years-long campaign in the Italian front of World War I, later fictionalized by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. This month marks a century since Italy joined the war, and bodies and artifacts from that time are now surfacing.

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On the other side of the world, glaciers in the Argentinian Andes have relinquished their grip on a different set of bodies: Incan children sacrificed five hundred years ago, and a young pilot who crashed just a few decades ago.

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Melting glaciers have released centuries-old moss, Roman coins, an iron age horse and even ancient forests.