As the world warms, long lost shipwrecks and frozen artifacts are emerging from the melting of glaciers and erosion beaches. However, there are drawbacks.
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Straight Arrow News
When a violent winter storm blew through a small Scotland island in February 2024, it excavated buried treasure.
It belonged to 18th A London whaler called Count Chatham, who crashed during the 1788 expedition to Artich, served the British Royal Navy during the American Revolution.
Without climate change, the wreckage may not have recovered.
Those who had worked for more than a year to identify Count Chatham believed in an increase in stormy weather and a new, unusual wind pattern for its discovery. The accelerated transformation of the coastline, known as the “Shipwreck Cradle,” could lead to similar discoveries in the future, they say.
Such discoveries have also happened in many other places.
As the planet continues to warm, glaciers melt and sea levels rise, scientists say discoveries like those found on Scotland’s Sandai Island are becoming increasingly common all over the world.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” said James Delgado, a maritime archaeologist who has been studying the remains for over 40 years. “And more discoveries are happening. Climate change is a factor, but we are looking at things too. We have discovered that it has disappeared in the past now.”
Shipwrecks Galore
Coastal erosion has long led to the surfaces of old shipwrecks, but has been “enhanced” as global temperatures rise and the number of ships increases.
Global sea levels have risen nearly four inches since 1992, according to data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Scientists estimate that every inch of sea level rise corresponds to a beachfront loss of about 8.5 feet across the coast.
Sea level rise means stronger rainfall.
“We see more dramatic terminations at the beach during storms, which strips off the sand and other things that have been hiding these wrecks for decades,” Delgado said. “More storms and higher sea levels are actually beginning to be drawn out of hiddenness.”
That same year, Count Chatham was discovered in Scotland, and the Massachusetts storm exposed a schooner that had been wrecked since 1909, the other North Carolina Outer Banks revealed boat ruins from 1919, and the Maine storm also resurfaced another 18th-century ship on an 18th-century beach.
Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Irma in 2017 erod Crescent Beach in St. Augustine, Florida, leading to the discovery of the 2020 Civil War ship. A couple walking along the beach found a wooden plank from Caroline Eddy, a union supply ship heading towards Philadelphia in 1880 when it was damaged by a huge wave.
Treasure hidden in the ice
As the climate warmed, melted glaciers also began to reveal frozen artifacts for thousands of years.
The dramatic melting of ice in Norway’s High Mountain in 2006 sparked the findings. Since then, archaeologists have collected over 3,000 items from the country’s glaciers and ice patches, spanning six,000 years of history, as part of an initiative called Secrets of the Ice.
Humans hunted reindeer and traveled along the Norwegian mountain ranges since the Stone Age. Julian Robert Postmelby, who has been working on the program since 2011, said that the items found on ice give historians a more vivid understanding of what life was like back then.
The artifacts are literally frozen.
“They look like they’ve been lost for 10 days, but they’ve been there for 4,000 years,” Melbye said.
Archaeologists found a bark container with waxed candles still inside. They found a dog with a collar that had fallen into the ice. They even said after Melby they have analyzed horse fertilizer for 800 years and discovered what the animals were eating and pollen counting at that time.
“All these ice artifacts are merely traces of a very rich and diverse community and society that we couldn’t study 20 years ago or that stretches virtually thousands of years.”
“The artifact has been destroyed.”
In the case of the post-Melby, the influx of new archaeological discoveries and excitement about what they mean to understand the past gives an immediate path to a stronger sense of hopelessness.
It is difficult to ignore what artifacts mean. “In the last 20 years in Norway, six,000 years of ice have melted,” he said.
Climate changes have led to more discoveries, but have destroyed existing archaeological sites and led to an increasing number of challenges for researchers.
Postmelby said a team of about six Norwegian archaeologists run against the clock every year, and that they interfere, crack or blow away in the wind before collecting new, unfreezing artifacts from 70 glacial sites.
The longer items are exposed to the elements, the more they deteriorate.
“There’s no way to get to every site,” Post Melby said. “We know that artifacts are destroyed every year.”
In other parts of the world, increased rain and rough seas have exhausted previously preserved historical sites.
For example, rock cliffs, a submerged prehistoric settlement from the Stone Age off the southern coast of England, have experienced four metres of erosion in 10 years, according to the British charity Maritime Archaeology Trust. Researchers are competing to be seen at underwater sites to rescue fully maintained artifacts, from flinttools to hazelnuts.
Marine mollusks, such as worms, are now migrating to the Baltic Sea, feeding on ships that remain in the cold waters.
He sees the archaeological discoveries of the onslaught and the increased conservation challenges brought about by climate change as “coal mine canaries.”
“I may be a victim of climate change, but it’s another reminder of what we need to do to slow down what’s going on,” he said.
