Out of the Ice

August 1, 2018

Gr 3-5-Our changing climate is causing Earth's ice to rapidly melt, creating future problems for much of the world. But from this difficult scenario a new scientific field is born: glacial archaeology. With the melting of the glaciers, ice sheets, and permafrost comes long hidden artifacts. Tools, clothes, and even fully preserved humans have been found in Norway, Peru, and parts of Siberia. Using tools such as radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis, and powerful scanners, glacial archaeologists are able to recover specific and exact information regarding the last days of their subjects' lives. Some of the remains discussed and illustrated are of children, long ago hunters, baby lions, and puppies. The findings revealed by the melting ice have reshaped some long held concepts of migration and evolution. Using photographs along with colorfully drawn illustrations as well as maps, charts, and an accessible text, this is a highly useful work. VERDICT A valuable resource in the study of climate change, environment, and history for students.-Eva Elisabeth VonAncken, formerly at Trinity-Pawling School, NY

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2018
Recent revelations from our planet's shrinking "cryosphere."Preserved in ice or permafrost like "the veggies in a kitchen freezer," artifacts and bodies both human and animal are now being discovered at an increasingly rapid pace in many parts of the world. With particular attention to finds in northern Canada and, more broadly, the northern region known as Beringia, Eamer highlights their variety--from cave lion cubs, woolly mammoths, and rotting 2,400-year-old caribou poop to a moccasin "worn and lost 1300 years ago" and an entire passenger plane that went down in Alaska in 1952 but has only since 2012 begun emerging from a receding glacier. Many of these are both chance discoveries and ephemeral, but they offer unique information about ancient times and our own histories. For human remains she includes descriptions of Ötzi (the "Iceman") and Scythian kurgan burials in the Altai Mountains among others but devotes particular attention to Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchi, a 200- to 300-year-old Indigenous teen found in northern Canada with, according to DNA analysis, 17 living relatives. Shannon fills in the sparse assortment of photographed artifacts and bodies with rough, generic paintings, mostly reconstructions of prehistoric scenes or images of wildlife and of researchers at work. The rare human figures visible in the painted art are nearly all light-skinned.A wide-angled survey of the hot new field of "glacial archeology." (timeline, resource list, index) (Nonfiction. 8-11)

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