Big thaw: Five weird things we've found as the world warms

Tuesday, August 28, 2018, 6:41 PM - Warming global temperatures can reveal secrets long thought buried.

Earlier this month, an American military transport plane that crash-landed in the Swiss Alps in 1946 was found in a shrinking glacier. Though all aboard were rescued soonafter, the plane could not be recovered, and gradually was lost beneath layers of snow and ice, hidden until recently.

Remarkable finds like this are going to happen more often as glaciers continue to recede and permafrost melts. Here are five weird things that give us an idea of what we can expect.

A missing couple on a 75-year walk

In the summer of 1942, a couple in the Swiss alps walking out to feed their cows vanished, leaving behind seven children, and no trace of their fate for three quarters of a century.

Last year, a ski lift operator spotted something in the shrinking Tsanfleuron Glacier: The remains of the missing pair, likely having fallen into a crevasse. Their discovery was a massive relief for the couple’s two surviving children, and there’s likely many more such finds in the years ahead. 

In that Swiss canton alone, the police keep a list of hundreds of people missing since the 1920s. In 2015, the remains of Canadian skier Gregory Barnes were found in the Italian Alps, the first sign of him since he first went missing in 1980. It seems the then-24-year-old had trouble with a binding, returned to his hut to fix it, then apparently fell into a crevasse while trying to catch up with his ski group:

But aside from travel, farming and tourism, the Alps have often been at the crossroads of war since ancient times, and grislier discoveries are likely as the snow and ice retreat.

Soldiers from a century-old conflict

In the popular imagination, the First World War was marked by endless, futile trench warfare, costing countless lives for minor gains as war was waged for the first time on an industrial scale.

That’s true for Flanders and northern France, but in the Alps, the conflict was a different kind of hell. There, soldiers of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire struggled with each other on mountain battlefields thousands of feet above sea level, in temperatures as low as -30C.

No one had fought war on that scale and at that height before, and casualties were heavy, with some bodies simply lost with no hope of recovery until a century later.

According to Mental Floss, 2004 was when the first remains began to be revealed by the melting ice and snow at the peaks -- three Austro-Hungarian soldiers. Every year since, more such finds have come to light, such that dozens of soldiers have been recovered, along with the remnants of the military infrastructure built to facilitate the war for both sides.

But long before the ice started giving up its memories of the war, it had already given archaeologists a glimpse of something much, much older.

Otzi the Iceman

The mind-blowing headlines shot around the world in 1991: Hikers had stumbled upon the remains of a prehistoric human, high in the Alps in the South Tyrol region, who had been preserved in the ice 5,300 years after his death.

Though long-dead, the mummy of the person now known as “Otzi the Iceman” still had plenty to tell archaeologists as they studied his body since his discovery. 

It seems he had been murdered as he crossed the valley, likely at the age of 45, quite old for the rough times he would have lived in. Parasites' eggs were found in his gut, fleas on his clothes, and there were even signs of Lyme disease in his DNA. He was wiry and suffered from several medical ailments, including joint pain and lungs blackened from apparently often being around fires. His skin was also adorned with some 61 simple tattoos (the museum where he is housed has a full online accounting of what his body has told us so far).

The discoveries haven’t stopped coming even decades after the body was found. A 2016 study of his vocal chords came up with an approximation of Otzi’s voice, and in 2017, an analysis of his stomach contents revealed a last meal that would have been like modern prosciutto:

A gigantic virus

So far, we’ve talked about shrinking glaciers, but the permafrost is melting as well, and some of the until-recently frozen things within are like something out of science fiction.

Case in point: A gigantic virus that is still viable and infectious despite being frozen almost 100 metres beneath the Siberian permafrost for 30,000 years, since long before anything resembling civilization.

Now, this isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s large by comparison to other viruses, sure (large enough to be seen in a visible light microscope, according to the CBC), and it only infects amoebas, so there is no risk to humans.

RELATED: PINK SNOW IN GLACIERS IS ACTUALLY BACTERIA, WHICH ACCELERATES MELTING

The latest such virus to be discovered was unearthed in 2015 (joining a handful of others found since around 2004), and the researchers say other ancient pathogens are likely to be discovered as the permafrost melts and Arctic and sub-Arctic industrial activities pick up. But the researchers are at pains to point out the chances of finding future such infectious to humans are relatively slim -- they’re more worried about new parts of the world opening up to diseases carried by mosquitoes gradually shifting north.

As well, in some parts of the permafrost, it's not viruses that we would have to watch out for, but bacteria.

Deadly biological pathogens

On Russia’s remote Yamal peninsula, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, an unexpected outbreak of one of farmers’ oldest foes caused a major crisis in the summer of 2016.

By the time it was contained, some 2,300 livestock, mostly reindeer, had been infected, along with around 100 humans, 20 of whom had to be hospitalized. One person, a 12-year-old child, died as a result of the outbreak.

The culprit, according to NPR, was likely the corpse of a reindeer that had been infected with anthrax, and had been frozen beneath the permafrost, the disease being put in the deep freeze until the 2016. It was the first anthrax outbreak since 1941.

Though anthrax vaccines exist, the Centres for Disease Control say anthrax spores are common enough in nature and can be easily reproduced in a lab, making it commonly used in biological warfare since the First World War.

Researchers say it may be a taste of things to come. As the world warms, and more of the permafrost thaws, it could expose diseases that have lain dormant for centuries, that mankind may not be prepared to handle.