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The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

author:1icebear

Compile: Mintina

This summer, the appearance of a small rock antelope, a goat-antelope species, may herald an even better discovery – another Ötzi iceman? - As the glaciers of the Alps melt at a record-breaking rate.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Young female rock antelopes that became dry corpses were exposed to the surface of Gepatschferner, Austria's second-largest glacier, near the Italian border and the summit of Weißseespitze. This rock antelope lived about 500 years ago

Photo courtesy of Denise Hruby

Gepatschferner Glacier, Austria. Her feet were fixed in the middle of the glacier, and Andrea Fischer drew circles with her own chainsaws, separating the animals from the ice, which flew towards her face. Inside the circle: the dry rock antelope, perfectly adapted to the Alpine climatic conditions, the cute goat-antelope hybrid. This is a cub - a juvenile female who is no more than 61 cm/two feet tall.

"We believe she is about 500 years old," says Fischer, an Alpine glacier scholar at the Interdisciplinary Mountain Science Research Center of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in the Innsbruck region.

The skin of the animal's head has fallen off, with a horn and deep eye sockets, but the skin on the spine and ribs remains firm and comfortable. Clusters of walnut-colored fuzz fluttered in the wind, covering her legs — powerful, agile limbs that allowed her to jump from one rock to another in her life. At the last moment, she curled up her body. She may only be two years old.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Glacier scholar and team leader, Andrea Fischer transported the rock antelope in a plastic rain cloth

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Get an up-close look at the neck of the rock antelope. Fischer collects fluff scattered across the ice

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

The fluff still clings to the animal's powerful legs, allowing her to jump from rock to rock high in the Alps

"The amazing and shocking reason for this is that she is located where we are doing our research, and she happens to emerge from the ice as we pass through here," says Fischer, who has been studying The melting glaciers in Austria for more than 20 years. A colleague named Martin Stocker-Waldhuber saw rock antelope horns in melted ice while inspecting a weather station at the Gepatschferner glacier at an altitude of more than 3,353 meters/11,000 feet above sea level on the Italian border.

This summer, all the glaciers that dot the Alps are melting at an unprecedented rate. Snowfall was scarce last winter and had melted so early that the ice was unobstructed by the heat wave that engulfed the continent. At the end of the spring, Fischer said the 7-meter/23-foot-thick ice on the surface of the glaciers in the eastern Alps had melted — much larger than the volume of melting in the previous year.

While very regrettable, the rapid melting of the glacier also brings the expected excitement: other ruins that were perfectly preserved in the past or can they emerge from the ice?

In recent years, the remains of long-lost hikers have appeared in the Alps, along with soldiers frozen in high-altitude battles between Italy and Austria during World War I. Some 150,000 people died here, many buried by avalanches or died in the storm. Some semi-dry bodies were found in the ice.

"As the glaciers melt, there should be more discoveries here, and perhaps other humans who have frozen on the ice," said Albert Zink, head of the Dry Corpse Research Institute in Italy's Eurac region. "In fact, it's quite possible."

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

The dried carcass of the rock antelope was found at a site not far from the weather station the researchers looked at, a relatively flat area of the glacier

He said everyone wants to find another prehistoric human remains, such as Oz, the Iceman who has been studying for decades, and the remains were discovered in 1991 under very accidental circumstances. Oz is 5,000 years old, ten times older than Fischer's digging rock antelope — but this summer, thousands of years of ice in the Alps melted.

The rock antelope may just be the beginning.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

A helicopter came here to carry the rock antelope

Back on August 4, photographer Ciril Jazbeck and I joined Fischer and her team on a helicopter to the top of the Gepatschferner Glacier, where thick clouds were all in sight.

In fact, last summer, Stocker-Waldhuber saw horns outside the ice for the first time, but the animals were too exposed to move the rock antelope safely before the winter snow buried it. After most of the ice melted this summer, the researchers grasped a short cycle to carry the animal.

"We have two days, maybe three days," Fischer said when she first told me about the discovery.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

The researchers were ready to take the rock antelope to a helicopter, take it off the mountain, and then drive back to the Innsbruck area.

The rapidly changing weather conditions at 3,505 meters/11,500 feet above sea level make helicopter flights too dangerous. And once the glacier melts and is completely exposed to the air, the dry bodies will soon begin to decay – and besides, the vultures circling in the upper part of the glacier are likely to take the lead.

This prevented Fischer from doing the same meticulous work as archaeologists did. After moving the frozen rock antelope from the ice with a saw and an ice pickaxe, she lifted the animal and placed it on a plastic sheet. She noticed a huge pungent smell - then quickly wrapped around the dry body and sealed it with duct tape.

From one frozen area to another: The researchers cut a rock antelope from the Gepatschferner glacier, wrapped it in plastic sheeting, sent it to a helicopter, then transferred it to a car, drove to the Innsbruck area, and finally placed it in a freezer at the Tyrolean Regional Museum Research Center.

A native of the Alps, Fischer crossed glaciers for the first time in his youth. Most of the ice, she said, has long since disappeared.

Since about 1850, the 4,000 glaciers in the Alps have been melting, but human-induced climate change has caused the ice to melt at a rapid rate. According to the 2019 intergovernmental panel of experts on climate change, it is expected that by 2100, the ice layers of most glaciers will disappear, leaving only a little area, perhaps, or perhaps not called glaciers.

Glacier scholars, such as Fischer, know this. And, she says, "I don't think any of us can imagine the dramatic changes that will come this summer." ”

At the Gepatschferner Glacier, as the sun rises to a higher position, the sound of ice chips falling and cracks in the ice surface becomes more pronounced – like the requiem played by the glacier itself. At noon, before we boarded the helicopter and headed for the lower-end area of the mountain, we struggled in muddy snow slurry that had reached beyond our ankles.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Martin Stocker-Waldhuber collects data and commissions automatic weather stations. While coming here in 2021, he saw rock antelope horns on the surface of the ice.

There is still eight meters of ice in the lower part of the rock antelope, Fischer said, going back 6,000 years. This year, she expects the site to lose 4,000 years of ice.

Such a discovery is rare

Earlier this summer, I joined Fischer on a trip to another of her research sites, the Jamtal Glacier on the Austrian-Swiss border. As we hiked along the narrow valley, she pointed toward the crumbling, high rocky enclosure, which prehistoric humans had tried to protect their cattle, sheep, and goats from bears and wolves. Traces of long-lost settlements are scattered throughout the Alps.

About 6,000 years ago, most of the eastern part of the Alps was ice-free. Because the valley is full of jungle swamps, people live on steep slopes of mountain peaks. But 5,000 years ago, when the Iceman of Oates was wounded by an arrow and bled to death at a site in the Similaun Glacier, just a few miles southeast of the Gepatschferner Glacier, the ice mass began to grow again.

When it was discovered 31 years ago, the Oz Iceman was initially thought to be a hiker or skier in the twentieth century, and died in an accident. A local police officer grabbed him by the buttocks as he tried to drag him out of the ice. To make it easier to transport him down the hill, his bow was folded in half. Subsequently, the village mourners twisted his arm, allowing him to be tucked into a coffin.

The process of discovering this archaeological treasure so bad now seems absurd, but scientists were stunned to realize that Oz was an ancient, intact dry corpse. Never before have people seen such remains on glaciers. There's an explanation for this, says Norwegian glacier archaeologist Lars Holger Pilø.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Peter Morass, a taxidermy maker from the Ferdinandeum region, measures a horn of a rock antelope at the Tyrolean Regional Museum in the Innsbruck region

Despite the countless human and animal deaths in the glacial area, Pilø explains that we cannot expect to see a large number of moves away, as the glacier's ice surface continues to move, slowly flowing towards the valley, and the top is gradually covered with new snowfall. For centuries, these layers of ice have been interspersed with the movement of dead animals and humans.

"Their bodies were damaged and shattered by the flowing ice," Pilø said.

Since Oates, scientists have realized that there are exceptions here: near, even in the moving sea of ice, there are ice surfaces that do not move. There are some flat, cold enough rock formations and ice surfaces to freeze, but not too thick and won't flow under the influence of its own gravity.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Taxidermy maker Peter Morass is in his laboratory at the Tyrolean Museum Research Center

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Andrea Fischer, an glaciologist who led the team to discover the rock antelope

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Martin Stocker-Waldhuber, one of the team members who found the rock antelope

In the Norwegian town of Innlandet alone, Pilø identified more than 60 layers of still ice. He said that the discovery of a human corpse in one of them was his "holy grail."

Another Oates Iceman remains this year?

Fischer's rock antelope is now safely stored in a freezer at the Ferdinandeum Research Centre, an external Tyrolean regional museum in the Innsbruck area. The animal is waiting for a CT scan, and people plan to check their internal organs. Working with zink's team to excavate the 400-year-old rock antelope carcass in 2020, scientists hope to learn more about the species's almost unknown history, and perhaps why the two animals appeared on the glacier and died here.

"At this point, my most exciting research is the panda in the zoo," told Peter Morass, head of the taxidermy department at the Ferdinandeum Research Center. "But this rock antelope is above all else." In the future, the rock antelope will be a special exhibit at the Innsbruck Museum.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

The rock antelope is placed in a freezer at the Ferdinandeum Research Center. The animal will eventually be on display in the museum.

For Zink, the two rock antelopes are an opportunity to gain more knowledge of the same process that Oz eventually became a dry corpse – in addition to developments regarding the movement and conservation of frozen dry corpses around the world. His agency has developed protective boxes that can be sealed and maintained with minimal cost.

"So, when more remains show up, we're ready," Zink said.

The search for dried corpses was never part of Fischer's plan. As an glaciologist, she is interested in ice that doesn't move for different reasons: at these sites, she can drill through ancient ice surfaces to get evidence of a thousand years of warming and cooling in the Alps.

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

Andrea Fischer collects wool from the spot where she found the antelope. She also found some wood chips and leather.

But at the moment, the weather was changing rapidly, and she realized that her work as a glacier scholar made it possible for her to find the next Oates Iceman.

Later this summer, when the glacier melts to its peak, she plans to fly to places she knows the ice won't flow; She found ten such areas in the Austrian Alps. She will check the ice for signs of other icemen.

"If things do happen," she says, "then it's this summer." ”

Source: Denise Hruby, Photo courtesy of Ciril Jazbec

The 500-year-old dried carcass of the "Austrian" rock antelope was found in melting glaciers in Europe

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