Could New Zealand's retreating glaciers give up hidden taonga?

Tuesday, 28 December 2021

A 4200-year-old redwing thrush found in an ice patch in Norway. Are native birds preserved in New Zealand's glaciers?

Climate change is melting treasures out of Northern Hemisphere glaciers. What taonga could emerge from New Zealand’s glaciers? WILL HARVIE reports.

The first ski was discovered in 2014. Found near the Digervarden ice patch in Norway, it was 1300 years old and pre-dated the rise of Viking culture. Researchers kept an eye on the spot, hoping another would emerge.

Last summer in the Northern Hemisphere, when satellite imagery showed the ice had retreated even more, the research team sent an archaeologist to look again.

Sure enough, a second ski was found in September about 5 metres away from the first, and deeper in the ice. Both were hewn from wood and not identical like modern skis. But their bindings were the same and they were declared a pair – “the best-preserved prehistoric pair of skis in the world”.

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Runar Hole holds a 1300-year-old ski found at Digervardenthe, Norway. Its pair was found nearby.

Welcome to the world of glacier archaeology, a new field made possible by climate change.

Ice is a great preservative and more than 3500 artefacts – including arrows, darts, cloaks, shoes, traps, snares, walking sticks and ancient human remains – have been found in recent years, as documented on the Secrets of the Ice website helmed by Norway-based scientists.

Seeing these amazing discoveries from afar prompts the question of what might melt out of New Zealand glaciers and ice patches due to climate change.

As New Zealand has no appreciable permafrost, we won’t be seeing the likes of woolly mammoths and cave lions that have been discovered in Siberia. But we have glaciers.

To speculate on what is most likely to emerge, it is useful to delve into Aotearoa’s history.

Archaeological and genetic records show Polynesian seafarers arrived on this archipelago around 1280.

Julian Post-Melbye examines an arrow that melted out of an ice patch. Norwegians have hunted reindeer in the high alpine for millennia.

Ngāi Tahu archaeologist Atholl Anderson and others have said this is largely backed up by Māori oral traditions.

Britain’s Captain James Cook first reached these islands in 1769. So there’s roughly 500 years of pre-European occupation. That isn’t long by Northern Hemisphere glacier archaeological standards.

Birds, on the other hand, have lived on Zealandia – the continent that’s today hidden under New Zealand and the surrounding Pacific – for millions of years. Current ice isn’t anywhere near that old.

An upland moa above the snowline. The image is from the series Extinct Birds of New Zealand, by Paul Martinson, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

A useful place to start is probably the last Ice Age, which began 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,000-15,000 years ago. It probably wasn’t a steady retreat, and glaciers and ice patches grew and retreated with the seasons and other fluctuations.

Birds have been found in glacial ice. A 4200-year-old redwing thrush was recovered from an ice patch in the Oppdal mountains in central Norway in 2017.

It is “very well preserved … [and] looked like it had died yesterday”, wrote Dr Jørgen Rosvold, deputy research director in terrestrial biodiversity at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, in an email.

A Secrets of the Ice camp just under an ice patch. Unlike glaciers, these permanent ice features don’t move much.

“We opened it up and it even had all of its internal organs still relatively intact.”

Frozen birds have also come out of mountain ice in the Yukon, northwest Canada.

In warm years, ice patches and glaciers in Scandinavia and North America are “littered with numerous small bird and rodent mummies”, says Secrets of the Ice.

New Zealand is losing its glaciers at record speeds. New international research finds glaciers here are thinning seven times faster now than 20 years ago.

At the Grasshopper Glacier in the US state of Montana, swarms of grasshopper mummies have been found entombed.

So it’s possible that birds could emerge from New Zealand’s ice. Some could even be extinct.

There are 62 extinct birds listed in the Department of Conservation’s December 2021 Conservation Status of Birds report.

Upland moa had long-slender toes that “may have been adapted for walking across snow”, according to the NZ Birds Online website. Could one have succumbed to the cold, frozen quickly and then become entombed in ice?

How about the extinct South Island piopio, which was abundant from sea level to the alpine zone on the West Coast through to the 1880s?

“There’s potential,” says University of Otago palaeogeneticist Nic Rawlence. “Not as big as in the Northern Hemisphere, but potential.”

According to Secrets of the Ice, archaeologists don’t usually find objects in glaciers themselves. “Big, sliding glaciers that crunch their way down rock slopes [are] no good for the survival of fragile artefacts,” it says.

Crevasses sometimes give up the remains of modern mountaineers or their gear, but they haven’t so far turfed out artefacts that interest historians.

Rather, most finds have come from ice patches, which are found off to the side of main glaciers. Ice patches don’t move, or move very slowly, and persist for thousands of years.

These days, they are melting.

Ötzi the Iceman was found in an ice patch near a flowing glacier on the Italian-Austrian border in 1991.

At more than 5000 years old, he predates the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. Ötzi’s gear and body continue to fascinate the public and scientists, in part because an arrowhead was found lodged in his shoulder.

Italy turned Ötzi into a tourist attraction and built a museum in Bolzano, South Tyrol, around him. He’s even on display in a “specially-devised cold cell and can be viewed through a small window”.

In Canada, Kwäday Dän Tsʼìnchi, meaning “Long Ago Person Found”, was discovered in an ice patch by hunters. He was determined to be 18 or 19 years old, and lived between 1720 and 1853.

Otzi the Iceman is on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.

Kwäday Dän Tsʼìnchi was a coastal dweller near the British Columbia-Yukon border, and had travelled to high altitudes in the days immediately before his death.

Genetic testing showed he had living relatives among the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations people still residing in the area.

Members of his tribe helped to remove Kwäday Dän Tsʼìnchi from the ice and were involved throughout the investigation. He was cremated according to local custom and his ashes interred near the scene of his death.

Ngāi Tahu in the Southern Alps

A horse snowshoe found in an ice patch in Norway.

In his book Uprising, Ngāi Tahu author Nic Low recounts his tramps and journeys through Kā Tiritiri-o-te-moana, the Southern Alps, following the routes used by his ancestors.

He shows that pre-European Māori had the gear, skills and curiosity to access alpine areas where ice patches are found.

The Māori language has words for snow, ice, thick ice, snowfields, glaciers and avalanches.

“No-one I read or spoke to was suggesting that high-alpine travel was a regular occurrence,” Low writes. “But I could believe that, on rare occasions, parties had crossed these alpine passes.”

He also recounts oral histories of alpine disasters by early Māori. The warrior Takawa died in a blizzard crossing Nōti Raureka (Browning Pass), a pounamu route. According to another story, an avalanche killed 20 men.

Māori implements were found near Godley Hut, on the route to Sealy Pass, about 25 kilometres northeast of Aoraki/Mt Cook.

Ngāi Tahu ancestors were “Eastern Polynesian seafarers when they arrived, but their mountainous new home made them Māori”, Low writes.

It’s possible that Māori lost belongings on these visits to the ice, just as those old Norwegians lost their gear, and that some of those items were preserved in Aotearoa ice, and that they could be found in the future.

So, will taonga melt out of New Zealand ice patches?

An unnamed curator at a New Zealand museum scoffed at the idea. They declined to be quoted, but said, in essence, that the odds were vanishingly remote.

The Secrets of the Ice team are more hopeful. They tried to stir up interest at an academic conference a few years ago, apparently without success.

The University of Otago’s Nic Rawlence speculated that melting ice may reveal a cave with bird remains inside. New Zealand birds have recently been found in lower elevation caves, and a rock shelter recently gave up 6800-year-old moa droppings.

Dream a little, Kiwis.

If you find something …

Get photos and a GPS location, advises palaeogeneticist Nic Rawlence.

Try not to disturb the artefact or the surrounding area.

Contact the nearest Department of Conservation office, the major museums or academics like Rawlence.

If human remains are found, the police will need to be involved.

If the find is probably pre-European, iwi involvement is appropriate.

Research by the Secrets of the Ice team has found that frozen artefacts deteriorate quickly once exposed to air, wind, rain and sunshine. It is appropriate to make contact quickly.