Hacker News

> To be clear, so far some of the oldest ice found is over 6 million years old...

And they're working on finding even older!

"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"

> And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?

"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?

If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.

6000 years ago was about the time of the last interglacial period so likely it was ice free at that time.

As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.

That's because they weren't exposed to the weather as much. Essentially these were 'shrinkwrapped' in nature's own version of Cosmoline. No bacteria, no free oxygen. Once did this with a rose to see how long it would last and it basically was perfect until we moved house. Many years and not even the slightest change, it didn't even lose color.

Conservationists and archivists (sometimes) use gloves on cleaned samples, but not archaeologists. An archaeologist wearing gloves is almost certainly just cold.

There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.

I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.

Me too but presumably they’re not really that unique as there are hundreds? Or maybe the stone/hard artifacts are handled different than organic/soft.

Thats one pretty arrowhead

Yes: most mainland Norway ice was gone during the holocene climatic optimum (9–6 thousand years ago), and glaciers recovered since then (until approx the 20th century, when deglaciation started accelerating again).

The climate is varying in long cycles, and the deglaciation 20 thousand years ago (last glacial maximum) was driven by a spike in summer temperatures, and this peak has already long passed. Ice ages and interglacial periods have a certain momentum to them, so it takes more than just that to go back to full ice age..

Yes, the early Neolithic was warmer than modern era.

Whatever you put in the glacier the glacier gives back to you. Anything you leave there ends up at the bottom of it in the moraine.

Climate is out. Climate tech too.

AI is in.

Nah. For centuries up to the 1850s, climate was looking pretty dicy. The little ice age, had it gone on, might have represented a return a big ice age.

The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.

Amazing how humanity keeps lucking out like this.

Yes.

unlikely there are any in the ice that were not also present outside the ice

[dead]

I come from a land down under

Crom!

That last sentence is how we know you've never been there. The ratio is the same as anywhere else.