Frozen stories: Uncovering time in the world’s extremes
In the regions around the Arctic and Antarctic, clues to our past lie trapped beneath the ice—frozen in time. Today, scientists are unlocking their secrets and looking ever further back into our planet’s past.
In the haunting beauty of the snow swept ice fields of the Arctic north and Antarctic south, time seems to take on a different meaning. Along with the polar days and nights, when the sun doesn’t rise or set for weeks on end, the ice beneath your boots can be as much as six million years old. Here, time is frozen. But time ticks on and scientists and archaeologists are today encouraging the ice to yield its ancient secrets—prying open a frozen time capsule, they gain tantalizing glimpses of extraordinary stories lost long ago in the world’s less trodden landscapes.
With the compass needle pointing firmly north, the Langfonne ice patch, just a few degrees below the Arctic circle in the rugged peaks of Norway’s Jotunheimen mountain region, has proved exceptionally fruitful for the relatively new discipline of glacial archaeology. Here, amid the ice, snow, and scree, ancient artifacts lovingly made and lost thousands of years ago are now rising to the surface. In 2006, the chance discovery of a 3,300-year-old leather shoe prompted meticulous searches of the site that have revealed the remains of abundant prehistoric reindeer and numerous arrows—the oldest dating back 6,000 years. Buried in the subarctic ice, the intense cold has preserved these ancient arrows so perfectly that they look to have been made only yesterday. For them, time has stood still.
But the ice hasn’t stood still. The dispersal of the Langfonne finds has revealed how thawing and freezing over millennia has moved many objects along every axis—bringing them to the surface to be carried away by meltwaters until frozen and buried once more. It’s a phenomenon that glaciologists are still exploring. Similarly, the concentration of arrows and reindeer remains from particular periods hints at the times when animal and human interaction peaked, troughed, and changed for reasons that historians are now working to understand and explain.
The extraordinary finds at Langfonne are allowing archaeologists to peer through time and piece together a picture of life in the North’s frozen past. Prehistoric reindeer, shunning the summer warmth, climbed higher into the mountains to herd together in the cool of the ice patch, which remained frozen. Neolithic hunters followed them. Armed with generations of knowledge and carefully crafted arrows tipped with stone, they skillfully stalked their prey through the snow and let loose with mechanical precision. The resulting feast might well have meant their survival in the harsh cold of these subarctic mountains—experience and technology keeping humans alive in this beautiful, but harsh environment.
The air remains bitingly cold as the compass needle swings south to take a traveler and their timepiece towards the icy Antarctic, where time zones converge as lines of longitude meet. And embedded in the icy landscape of the glacial southern tip of South America is one of the most remarkable and moving discoveries from the enigmatic age of the dinosaurs.
Once, the seas above what is now Chile were the domain of magnificent dolphin like predators—the ichthyosaurs. Now, the compelling story of the final moments of one of these great marine reptiles has emerged from the ice of Patagonia. Around 131 million years ago, the shifting continents caused a catastrophic landslide that swept up an ichthyosaur and plunged it headfirst into the sands of the seabed, where it was quickly buried in sediment. And there she lay, fossilized and forgotten beneath what became the Southern Patagonian ice field, until in 2022 she was unearthed and given a name: Fiona.
Fiona is special. The extraordinary efforts made to excavate her remains, from a remote glacier battered by wind and snow, were made worthwhile by the pristine condition of her skeleton—and it was a skeleton that told a fascinating story. Fiona’s fin shows signs of an injury that had healed, and she had fused bones suggesting that at some point she had recovered from an infection. There were even the vertebrae of small fish in Fiona’s ribcage—likely the remains of her last meal.
But what really made Fiona such a special find were the babies she was carrying. Positioned in the birth canal, delivery was likely imminent when disaster struck. And this unique discovery is helping to fill in key gaps in our knowledge. While earlier ichthyosaurs were born headfirst, Fiona’s babies were in a tail first position, perhaps marking an evolutionary progression toward how modern marine mammals, such as whales and dolphins, give birth—tail first. Fiona’s tragedy captured in rock, ice, and time, is giving paleontologists a revelatory insight into the life of these long-lost animals—a window into the past.
Time is precious precisely because it can never be reclaimed. But the beautifully preserved artifacts and fossils being recovered from beneath the snow and ice of the glacial North and South are perhaps as close as we can get to seeing into the past—recapturing moments frozen in time that tell remarkable, relatable, truly poignant stories.
