Haunting Discoveries Found in Ice | Unveiled

4 Haunting Discoveries Found in Ice

When seen from above, a sheet of ice might seem like a pristine and majestic natural mass. Unmarked and clear, from top to bottom. But if you dig even just a little deeper… there are often unseen surprises lurking below. Over the years we’ve seen how many discoveries have been found frozen within the iciest depths of our planet… but also that some of those have been more disturbing than others.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re taking a closer look at four of the most haunting discoveries ever found in ice.

Under most conditions, most things gradually erode when left out to the elements. They don’t stand much chance of remaining as they were. Ice, however, has the capacity to preserve things (including things that are long dead) to a remarkable extent. A famous example of this is Ötzi the Iceman, who was discovered in Europe, in 1991. Naturally mummified, he was found frozen in the Ötztal Alps along the Austria/Italy border, and is thought to have been alive around 5,200 years ago. The discovery of Ötzi still goes down as a breakthrough moment in our study of ancient times.

It's not as though all icy regions have the same history, though. Earth has experienced a number of ice ages over its lifetime, ranging from one that took hold around two billion years ago… to the last major ice age, which ended around twelve thousand years ago. Now, however, with climate change warming Earth and melting much of the ice that’s here today, in some regions we’re seeing parts of our planet re-emerge from the frost… a process which has sometimes unearthed strange relics from the past. Some of these discoveries have been beneficial and have helped us to better understand what came before us… but others have proven more disturbing, tragic, and even deadly.

One such discovery takes us to the battlegrounds of World War One, and specifically to the mountains of Italy. The battles that raged here during the conflict came to be known as the “White War” due to the freezing conditions and snow underfoot. Ultimately, it’s thought that more soldiers died here due to the severe weather (and avalanches) than due to the actual fighting itself. Many of those soldiers sought shelter in nearby caves, where they set up barracks, until even those caves became inaccessible as they were gradually frozen shut. That was until the late 2010s, when warmer temperatures melted through the ice to allow a team of modern historians in.

They soon found a variety of war relics including ammunition boxes, weapons, water bottles, and lanterns. But they also found more personal and distressing items, such as diaries and undelivered letters, detailing the harsh and inhumane conditions that the soldiers had faced… including starvation, and temperatures far, far below freezing. What’s worse, though, as melting has made more and more of the region accessible, researchers have also begun to find the bodies of lost soldiers that were never previously recovered, having died on the mountains all those years ago. This part of Italy has, then, become a harrowing location, releasing more and more bodies as time goes by.

Unfortunately, the discovery of bodies in the ice is by no means a one-off event. And, in 1999, on the summit of the volcano Llullaillaco, along the border between Argentina and Chile, at the highest archaeological site ever excavated, another chilling situation unfolded. Researchers uncovered the frozen bodies of three children locked in a confined chamber below the earth. It was determined that they had likely been part of an unsettling sacrifice ritual conducted by the Inca civilization, with hair samples reportedly revealing that they’d been drugged before they were left to die. Research suggests that the Inca civilization held sacrifices like this in the belief that the process would ensure successful harvests in the future.

It’s thought that the bodies found on the volcano, in 1999, had likely been sacrificed around 500 years ago. Further details made the discovery even more haunting, however, as one of the bodies was found to have been struck by lightning sometime after death… leading to severe burn marks across her face, and therefore the nickname “Lightning Girl”. And while, mercifully, it’s said that all three do appear to have died in their sleep… there were traces of blood at the site, as well as evidence that at least one of them had been tied. The three mummies are now exhibited in the Museum of High-Altitude Archaeology in Salta, Argentina.

Next, to Siberia in 2016, where a particularly strong heatwave caused permafrost to thaw, uncovering another, eerie, and this time almost deadly, buried secret: the carcass of a reindeer that had died of anthrax poisoning some seventy-five years ago. The sight of the reindeer may not have been too haunting or unexpected in itself… but it’s what came after that was so frightening for those who discovered it. Because the permafrost had preserved the reindeer body so well, the anthrax bacteria had remained alive. After decades, the once-trapped, potentially lethal spores quickly spread across the surrounding tundra. As such, other, alive reindeer in the area began to become infected, and thousands reportedly died. The anthrax was spread to nearby towns, as well, though, with claims that many more thousands of people were infected, too… reportedly leading to the death of at least one and the hospitalization of forty others.

In this case, specialists had to be quickly dispatched to the area, to deal with the outbreak. But scientists and archaeologists worry that what makes this one reindeer discovery even worse are the implications that it has for the future. As climate change triggers more and more melting ice in Siberia, it’s feared that this situation could happen again and again. There are thought to be thousands of burial grounds (in Siberia, and in other global locations) containing preserved animals that are potentially still infected with anthrax and other threats. Researchers claim there could be corpses out there that carry smallpox, for example, and even the bubonic plague. Diseases that are frozen under the earth for now... but could soon escape and re-enter society, with the potential for new outbreaks across cold regions whenever the temperature rises.

But finally, for today’s last discovery, not every frozen virus is known to us, and some may just be lurking in the ice without a host body, at all. In 2021, researchers taking ice samples from glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau in China discovered a variety of “mystery” viruses. Biological strains that they couldn’t immediately identify. Preserved in the ice, the viruses in question were this time determined to be around 15,000 years old… and some were amazingly still alive. Ultimately this might be viewed as an extremely disturbing discovery, though, because of the thirty-three different strains that researchers collected… the genetic code for twenty-eight of them reportedly revealed that they were completely new and unlike any other virus we’ve cataloged before. It could be argued, then, that there’s some reason for concern… as there’s very little that’s known about these viruses, how they work, or the effects they could have. This means that in a worst-case-scenario, the ice that had been housing them could’ve melted unbeknownst to us, and the unknown viruses could then have been spread around the world… perhaps taking hold in human, animal and plant populations.

The 2021 find wasn’t the first time that viruses had been discovered directly preserved in ice, either. A co-authored study published in 2015 found that a “30,000 year old virus”, taken again from samples in the Siberian permafrost and known as Mollivirus Sibericum, could still have infected modern life in some way. The authors of the study noted then that the possibility for ancient viruses to be revived should be a big concern for the future of life on Earth… again taken together with the continued impact of climate change and global warming, which continues to melt the ice.

With these four examples, we can see that the preservative power of ice can be considered a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can almost perfectly retain items (and even bodies) from ancient history, allowing historians and scientists to gain a detailed glimpse of nature and cultures from long ago. On the other hand, however, the things that were once lost to ice can return with a harrowing impact. And there’s the potential for serious, real-world danger, as well.

In modern times, increasing ice melt has meant that these types of discoveries are becoming more and more frequent. And, in the coming years, it’s tipped that so many more disturbing stories and latent threats could come to the fore. But, for now, those are four of the most haunting discoveries ever found in ice.