Academic Reading — Test 165

Reading passage

In September 1991, two German hikers crossing a high ridge in the Otztal Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy, came across a human body protruding from the melting ice. They assumed at first that it was the corpse of an unfortunate mountaineer who had perished in some recent accident. Only later, after the remains had been recovered and examined, did scientists establish that the man had died roughly 5,300 years ago. Nicknamed Otzi after the region in which he was found, the Iceman became one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, precisely because the conditions of his death and burial had preserved not only his bones but also his skin, internal organs, clothing and equipment. The reason for this extraordinary preservation lies in a rare combination of circumstances. Otzi appears to have died in a sheltered gully, where his body was quickly covered by snow and protected from scavenging animals. Crucially, the gully lay just below the path of the glacier that subsequently flowed over the area. Because the ice moved around the hollow rather than grinding directly through it, the body was not crushed or carried downhill, as usually happens to objects trapped within a moving glacier. Instead, Otzi was effectively freeze-dried: the cold, dry conditions halted the bacterial decay that would normally destroy soft tissue within weeks. For more than five millennia he remained sealed in this natural deep freeze, until an unusually warm summer and a layer of wind-blown dust darkening the ice accelerated the melt and exposed him. The scientific value of the find has proved immense. Researchers have been able to reconstruct Otzi's diet from the contents of his stomach, which revealed a final meal of ibex meat and cereals eaten only hours before his death. Analysis of pollen grains in his gut showed that he died in spring, while isotopes in his teeth and bones indicated that he had grown up in one valley but spent his adult life in another. Perhaps most dramatically, a careful examination using imaging technology revealed an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, suggesting that he had been attacked and had bled to death rather than simply succumbing to the cold. His copper axe, in remarkably good condition, demonstrated that metalworking had reached Alpine communities earlier than many specialists had assumed. Otzi's preservation also illustrates a broader phenomenon now driving a new field of study. As mountain glaciers and permanent snow patches retreat in response to a warming climate, they are releasing artefacts and remains that have been locked away for centuries or even thousands of years. This discipline, sometimes called glacial or ice-patch archaeology, has yielded hunting weapons, items of clothing, pack animals and frozen human remains across the Alps, Scandinavia and North America. Unlike conventional excavation, which can be planned and conducted at a measured pace, glacial archaeology is largely dictated by the weather. Objects emerge unpredictably and, once exposed to air and sunlight, can deteriorate with alarming speed. Organic materials such as leather, wood and feathers, which may have survived intact in the ice, sometimes crumble within a single season if they are not recovered promptly. This urgency presents both an opportunity and a dilemma for researchers. On the one hand, the melting ice is handing them a wealth of material that no amount of digging could otherwise produce. On the other hand, the same process that reveals these treasures is destroying them, and there are simply not enough trained specialists to monitor every retreating glacier. Some teams now rely on networks of hikers and mountain guides to report unusual finds, while others use predictive mapping to identify the sites most likely to contain preserved material. There is also a difficult ethical question about how human remains, in particular, should be treated once they emerge from the ice, since they may have descendants or cultural significance for present-day communities. Otzi himself is now housed in a purpose-built museum in Bolzano, in northern Italy, where he is kept in a special cold chamber that recreates the temperature and humidity of a glacier. The conditions are monitored continuously, and the body is periodically sprayed with sterile water to maintain a thin protective layer of ice. In this sense the Iceman remains frozen even in death, a reminder that the very fragility which makes such discoveries so valuable also makes them desperately hard to keep. As the world's high mountains continue to lose their ice, scientists face a race against time to rescue the stories that the glaciers have guarded for so long.