Despite its many negative repercussions, there is one benefit of climate change that is proving to be a boon to archaeologists: melting ice is revealing ancient artifacts that have been trapped in ice and frozen in time for thousands of years.

"This is one tiny little instance where climate change is affording us the opportunity to learn something about the past," Dr. Craig Lee, an environmental archeologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research tells PNAS (the Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences). "It is the tiniest of silver linings."

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In 2007, Lee found a 10,300-year-old hunting dart that turned out to be the oldest human artifact that has ever been discovered encased in ice. 

Lee is among a small but growing number of scientists who work in the nascent field of "ice patch archaeology," which refers to the study of anthropogenic artifacts recovered as a result of melting snow and ice patches. It is also referred to as "glacial archaeology" by European researchers. Climate change is melting once-permanent ice patches at high latitudes and high elevations, which releases ancient paleobiological and archaeological materials that had until then been suspended in a cryogenic-like state.

Ice can preserve artifacts in two different kinds of sites: glaciers and ice patches. Ice has attracted ancient animals and their human hunters, and as a result have maintained an historical record of sorts on human hunting and other activities. The ice in these areas exhibit little internal deformation or movement, and it can preserve otherwise perishable materials for literally thousands of years.

It's a relatively new field that has only been around for a few decades because it had wrongly been assumed that the humans had never lived in the areas that are now permanently covered in ice and snow. But as climate change began melting glaciers and ice patches, scientists came to discover that humans used to regularly hunt and travel on the ice. It wasn't until 2008 that the first international symposium for ice archaeologists was held - appropriately enough - in the shadow of the Alps in Bern, Switzerland.

Thanks to melting ice, archaeologists in the Swiss Alps have discovered Neolithic leather clothing, Roman shoe nails, and a shoe repair kit from the 14th or 15th century. It is no coincidence that the dates of the artifacts correspond to times when the climate was warm enough to make the area passable. Lee also helped identify eight prehistoric sites in association with perennial ice patches within the Greater Yellowstone Area of Montana and Wyoming.

However, the downside to melting ice is that the artifacts no longer have the protection that had kept them in such pristine condition for thousands of years. Although the artifacts manage to stay amazingly well preserved in the ice, they begin to deteriorate immediately upon thawing.  "The sad fact of the matter is, the few things we find are clearly the tip of the iceberg," Lee says. "It's inconceivable to think about what's been lost."

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