Frozen in Time: 8 Fascinating Things Found Beneath the Ice

Did you know that researchers discovered an entire frozen penguin colony in Antarctica? It's not the only strange thing that's been found locked in ice either - take a look at...

• A 28,000-Year-Old Cave Lion
• Everest's Grim Rainbow Valley
• A Mummified 9,000-Year-Old Bison
• Preserved (But Living) Ancient Microbes
• A 30,000-Year-Old Frozen Squirrel
• A Full Adélie Penguin Colony
• Entire World War I Battlefields
• A 57,000 Year-Old-Wolf Pup

A 28,000 Year-Old-Cave Lion

Everyone and their dog has heard of mammoths preserved beneath the permafrost... but this pair of cave lion cubs are a different story.

Found in near-perfect condition close to the Senyalyakh River of Siberia, the female cub (dubbed Sparta) is so well preserved that she's retained her whiskers despite being an estimated 27,962 years old. She was only a couple of months old at the time of her death, and a lack of missing flesh suggests she died due to an accident rather than a predator - possibly a mudslide or cave in.

A second cub in the same area (dubbed Boris) was even older but hadn't been quite so well preserved. Still, the fact that he lasted for 43,448 years should count for something!

Everest's Grim Rainbow Valley

It's not just wild animals that end up entombed in ice. High on the slopes of Mount Everest is a place informally known as "Rainbow Valley." Here, the snow is tinted with the bright colors of camping gear, climbing outfits and mountaineering equipment... often on the frozen bodies of climbers who didn't survive their trip.

Rainbow Valley is in Everest's death zone, where oxygen becomes perilously low and an unprotected human starts to die. Spending prolonged lengths of time here is unavoidably fatal... and even attempts to recover the bodies of the fallen can end in disaster. Instead, climbers are often left where they fell, producing grim landmarks such as the Rainbow Valley.

A Mummified 9,000-Year-Old Bison

Another find from frosty Siberia is an ancient bison uncovered when a lake-shore slipped in 2011. Despite being 9,000 years old, the beefy beast was very well preserved and retained intact organs along with a complete (albeit shrunken) brain.

Despite what the contents of this list might suggest, it's apparently very rare to find an intact animal in the permafrost. Scavenging animals get two bites at the apple - ancient creatures get to feed on the creature when it dies, while modern creatures (like foxes) get a turn when it thaws out.

On curious thing about this particular bison is that it may have died from starvation - it had very little fat in its body at the time of death!

Preserved (But Living) Ancient Microbes

"Scientists resurrect 40,000-year-old microbes trapped in Arctic ice." It may sound like the starting crawl of a horror movie, but that's what's happening at the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility in Alaska.

Despite having been frozen for millennia, researchers were able to coax these microbes back to life by gently warming them. It took a few months for them to start functioning again, but function they did.

Of course, it soon dawned on the researchers that they might be facing a major problem though probably not the one you're thinking of. Rather than being concerned about unleashing ancient diseases in the modern era, the microbes could start breaking down ancient biomatter trapped with them in the ice... releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide!

A 30,000-Year-Old Frozen Squirrel

In 2018, a mysterious brown blob of organic material was found in the Klondike goldfields. What could it be - a previously undiscovered lifeform? An extraterrestrial? Well, it turned out to be an ancient ground squirrel!

The creature died around 30,000 years ago, curled up in a ball as though still hibernating. Presumable it never woke up from its snooze, becoming a leathery but well-preserved ice-mummy.

What makes this relic particularly interesting is that ground squirrels have survived into modern times - so this mummified critter can be directly compared to them!

A Full Adélie Penguin Colony

Time for a rather strange detective story. It begins with ornithologist Steven Emslie braving Antarctica’s Ross Sea, chasing rumors of guano (bird muck) stains on an allegedly penguin-free shore.

When he explored the site it seemed that tragedy had struck - amidst the guano and nesting stones were strewn the corpses of Adélie penguins... but something wasn't quite right. Some of them looked more-or-less fresh, but others looked mummified.

Careful scientific analysis revealed the truth - the remains in the best condition were nearly 800 years old, while those that appeared to have mummified went back as far as 5,000. It seems that penguins have occupied that bit of shore several times over the millennia, with some of the bodies of their fallen preserved beneath the ice!

Entire World War I Battlefields

If the dead of Mount Everest weren't grim enough for you, how about the fact that the remains of entire WWI battlefields are emerging from the ice in the Alps?

The Guerra Bianca (White War) fought between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces was a brutal affair, with many more soldiers dying to the cold and mountainous terrain than the enemy. The dead (often in full uniform) lay beneath the snow until around the 1990s, when warming conditions started to thaw the ice.

It's not just bodies that are emerging - everything from food to fortifications can be found trapped in time. One such find was a wooden barracks dug into a cave overlooking Stelvio pass on Mount Scorluzzo. The dwelling had been abandoned in haste at the end of the war, with the occupants leaving most of their gear behind!

A 57,000-Year-Old Wolf Pup

Neil Loveless may have been prospecting for gold, but what he found was a frozen wolf pup emerging from the ice. The preserved pooch was only seven weeks old at her time of death... 57,000 years ago.

Named Zhur (wolf in the language of the local Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people) the wolf is in an incredible state given her age - even the papillae (the small rounded protuberances) on her tongue are intact.

Researchers were able to explore her genetics, revealing that Zhur's pack ultimately fell to the march of time. She bore DNA linking her to gray wolves in Alaska and Eurasia, but the gray wolves found in modern day Yukon have a different genetic profile - meaning that Zhur's group died out. Zhur herself is believed to have been slain when the den she was in collapsed, possibly explaining why she's so well preserved!

Thanks for reading - you might also like...

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• Why a Reindeer’s Nose Keeps It Warm in the Cold (and Other Weird Reindeer Facts)

Sources & Further Info:

• Near-Perfect Cave Lion Cub Corpse Found in Siberian Permafrost
• LAND OF THE DEAD Inside Everest’s chilling ‘Rainbow Valley’ home to 200 bodies of doomed climbers who suffered same fate as Andrew Irvine
• Researchers Are Examining a 9,000-Year-Old Bison Mummy
• Scientists resurrect 40,000-year-old organisms from Arctic ice – now they’re worried
• 'Brown blob' found in Yukon is a well-preserved Ice Age squirrel
• Ancient Adélie penguin colony revealed by snowmelt at Cape Irizar, Ross Sea, Antarctica
• Melting ice reveals first world war relics in Italian Alps
• 57,000 year-old wolf puppy found frozen in Yukon permafrost