WWI ammunition found in Italian glacier
Environmental activists dressed up as CO2 molecules stage a protest in Berlin on December 12, 2009, to coincide with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Some believe that the new research, “offers a response to those skeptical about human-caused global warming.” It explains that during the ice age 11,000 years ago, rises in CO2 levels followed warming, and not the other way around.
A melting Italian glacier has revealed vintage WWI ammunition, reports MSNBC.com, in a curious case of global-warming meeting military history.
UPI.com reports that about 200 rounds of 85/100 millimeter ordnance have been yielded by the receding glacier in Trentino, an autonomous district of Northern Italy.
It's thought that the vintage ammunition got there during battles between Italy and Austrian-Hungarian armies, says MSNBC, somewhere between 1915 and 1918.
Weapons buffs should probably hold up on the plane tickets, though: munition disposal experts were called in to take away the bullets, says MSNBC.
Read more: Melting glacier reveals WWI ammunition – MSNBC.com
Glaciers have been known to reveal other secrets: there's the famous Ice Man, for example, a prehistoric human dwelling in Italy's Tyrol mountains, who died between 3350 and 3100 BC, and was then incredibly well preserved by the ice.
Read more: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology – Otzi the Ice Man
His body has proved to be a remarkable boon to scientists interested in how our earliest ancestors lived—he even had tattoos.
All those movie tropes about wooly mammoths and other ancient creatures being preserved in ice is, actually, a bit true (though none have come to life and gone on entertaining rampages in New York City).
Siberia is especially well known as a hot-bed of wooly mammoth findings: in April, the BBC reported that scientists had found a 10,000 year old mammoth carcass, frozen in the ice and with its reddish fur still intact.