Book review: Exploring the cultural connection between humans and ice through time

ByDr. Tim Sandle
DIGITAL JOURNAL
August 15, 2024

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have shed more than half-a-trillion tonnes annually since 2000 -- six icy Olympic pools every second - Copyright AFP Stefanie Loos

Around the world, ice has preserved some of history’s most fascinating artifacts, such as the skeleton of an Iron Age horse, wooden arrows with bird-feather fletching, and even a baby mammoth.

While important, these important pieces of history were only discovered as the ice began to do what we all feared: melt.

Science journalist Lisa Baril travelled all over the world studying ice and its effect on humans. She has captured these trends in her new book: The Age Of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us about Climate, Culture, and a Future without Ice (published by Timber Press).

Barilis a science writer who has written about natural resources and science for national parks across the southwestern United States. She holds a master’s degree from Montana State University and is a member of the National Association of Science Writers, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

In the book, Baril explores the shifting view that humans have long held of glaciers—from fear, to awe, to conquest.

Baril begins with the story of Ötzi, the famous ice mummy discovered in 1991 by a pair of European hikers in the Alps. Ötzi was well preserved for a 5,300-year-old mummy because of the ice, but as important as his discovery was, it also unearthed a question: who has the right to ice’s information? A unique form of science, ice-patch archaeology, arose from the current climate crisis, as such discoveries could only be made at the cost of the world’s ice formations.

In another section she discusses how the unusually large number of hunting artifacts found in Norway’s Juvfonne ice patch, an area dating from the Late Antique Little Ice Age (536–660 CE). Her analysis indicates that massive volcanic eruptions from that period likely destroyed harvests and drove hungry farmers to hunt game in the mountains.

Baril offers detailed stories of the technique’s archaeologists use to reconstruct the lives of ancient humans through the analysis of pollen grains found in the Alpine corpse’s intestines.

It is paradoxical, Baril notes: “The more the ice melts, the more we learn about the past…while melting ice compromises our future.”

Yet, at the same time, Baril is hopeful: “Although we can’t rewind the clock to a time before human-caused climate change, we can use the knowledge gained from melting ice to help us respond more thoughtfully when considering the kind of future, we want for ourselves and for the generations of humans yet to be born.”

The Age of Melt explores what these artefacts reveal about culture, wilderness, and what we gain when we rethink our relationship to the world and its most precious and ephemeral substance—ice.

As a popular-science adventure, The Age Of Melttakes the reader on a world tour of ice, exploring the conflicting belief systems around ice and its integral relationship to people. From indigenous traditions for hunting and subsistence to patterns of global travel andtrade, and mythologies of spiritual reverence, melting ice has revealed so much about human culture, the environment, the past, and most importantly, the future.