As glaciers melt in Norway, archeologists are seizing the chance to find ancient artifacts, many of them perfectly preserved by the ice.
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00:00Norway's glaciers are melting away, and exposing long buried treasures.
00:06It's a race against time.
00:09Julian Post Melbjø is spending an increasing amount of time on these chilly slopes.
00:15Today he's reached an ascent of 2,000 meters.
00:17A few days ago he received a message.
00:20A tourist sent us some photos and GPS markers over archaeological finds he had seen while
00:27hiking in the area.
00:29So we're going to go check them out.
00:31Melbjø is an archaeologist at the University of Oslo, a glacier archaeologist to be exact.
00:38Glaciers are where he does his field research.
00:40For thousands of years our ancestors have been crossing them to hunt, conduct trade,
00:45or search for places to settle.
00:48An animated rendering shows how researchers reconstruct their findings.
00:56The ice along Lennbregen Glacier's edge is melting, like it does at the end of every
01:00summer.
01:01But now winter doesn't create enough snow to replenish it.
01:06Right now it's disappearing even though it's been here for the last 6-7,000 years for people
01:11to experience.
01:14And that's something that's hard to put into words how it makes the loss of a landscape.
01:22The melting ice is exposing the distant past, and archaeologists are excited.
01:28It takes Melbjø four hours to reach the site.
01:33He finds a plain wooden stick.
01:36He's been combing this area for artifacts for around 15 years, so he knows this is not
01:40a random discovery.
01:42A trade route from inland Norway to the west coast once ran through here.
01:46This is part of a scaring stick, the bottom half.
01:49And this is part of a mobile hunting fence for reindeer.
01:54And it would have been used in the late migration period, so sometime around 400 or 500 AD.
02:03So it's about 1,600 years old, this stick.
02:06A few meters further on, Melbjø finds the rest of the stick.
02:11Then it's time to head back down to the valley.
02:17There in Lom municipality, Melbjø and his colleagues put their discoveries on display.
02:25The local mountain museum has a section called Secrets of the Ice, featuring weapons, shoes,
02:32gloves and prehistoric skis.
02:35He points out his favorite.
02:37We have arrows used for hunting from the Stone Age to the medieval period.
02:42Up in the corner here, this is a small arrow.
02:47It's actually a toy.
02:49So this is, somebody's brought kids along while hunting, and the kids needed something
02:55to do while they were waiting for the reindeer to show up.
02:59The glacier's ice preserved everything.
03:02But now archaeologists are facing a major challenge.
03:06When the ice melts, we are moving back in time.
03:09We're finding more and more Bronze Age objects.
03:11We're finding more and more Stone Age objects.
03:14We're finding more and more better preserved objects.
03:17The ice is melting all across Norway's highlands.
03:21Melbjø takes us to another site in the Jotunheimen mountain range.
03:27And in the terrain in front of me, that is from the small river we have in front of us
03:32and all the way up until the ice, has melted back several hundred meters since we started
03:38work on this site.
03:47To give people an idea of what's at stake with the ice loss, the center has created
03:52an artificial ice tunnel for visitors and schoolchildren.
03:56The glacier archaeologist supports the project.
04:02We offer tourists a two and a half hour tour on which we try to give them a well-founded
04:07idea of the glacial landscape, about its particular biological features as well as the archaeology.
04:14We know that if the Earth's climate warms by two degrees Celsius, all of this will be
04:18gone by the end of this century.
04:23Before the glaciers vanish completely, Julian Post Melbjø and the other archaeologists
04:28will continue to work tirelessly in collecting whatever treasures the ice has preserved for
04:32thousands of years.