Inside the race to rescue Arctic relics before it’s too late
The Arctic is home to pristine artifacts. A few archeologists are rushing to find them, and the critical clues they can offer modern culture, before climate change destroys them forever.
Along the rocky shores of Pasley Bay, an uninhabited coastline high in the Canadian Arctic, archeologist Aka Simonsen strode along the tide with her eyes to the ground. Time was running short.
The fog was thickening, muting the morning light; if it became too dense, it would dangerously obscure the sight lines of the armed expedition members keeping watch for polar bears, forcing her to return to the ship anchored in the bay.
Simonsen, who’s Greenlandic Inuit and manages the UNESCO Kujataa World Heritage Site in southern Greenland, is one of very few archeologists specializing in studying the Arctic region. Combing the ground not far from her was Canadian Kaylee Baxter. When I met them in September, both were serving as experts aboard an Adventure Canada travel expedition, a strategic way for two independent archaeologists with limited funding to access some of the planet’s most remote sites.
On the morning of September 9, the pair moved with urgency to discover whether this shore held archeological sites that hadn’t yet been recorded. These relics will help Simonsen, Baxter, and others piece together how life was lived in this region up to five thousand years ago: how and what people hunted, how their societies were formed, and why they were able to survive in such a harsh region.
If these clues aren’t found soon, they could be lost forever.
The Arctic is rapidly warming as a result of climate change and taking with it pieces of the past. But the modern world needs the clues left behind by these early Arctic peoples. What can their migrations, cultural changes, and tools for survival through periods of climate instability teach us about how we can confront modern climate change?
Early life in the Arctic
Earth’s most northern reaches are home to a rich record of human history. Its peoples were closely connected to the land and its resources.
This landscape is frigid, dark, and icy for much of the year. But in September, it’s surprisingly vibrant with plant life in tones of rust and green and creeks rushing over bare rock. Shorelines are patterned with tracks from polar bears, foxes, and birds. The wind off the ocean or tidewater glaciers can be biting, but the sun, even low in the late summer sky, offers warmth.
Thanks to the cold conditions of ice and permafrost, artifacts here are often frozen in time; Baxter once found a centuries-old braided lock of animal hair that looked like it had been dropped just the day before.
But the Arctic is remote, logistically difficult to access, and the domain of polars bears, the largest land-based carnivores in the world. It’s a landscape of extremes in temperature and light, with only a few summer months hospitable for field work. As a result, Baxter and Simonsen say there are probably thousands of archeological sites and features that scientists haven’t even found yet.
Archeologists do know that separate waves of cultures existed here. The earliest cultures in modern-day Canada and Greenland—a subset of Arctic peoples, and distinct from those who inhabited Russia and northern Scandinavia—are referred to as Paleo-Inuit. They were largely replaced by the Thule culture, ancestors to present-day Inuit and Yupik, some one thousand years ago. While what these cultures fished and hunted varied—from whales and seals to caribou and polar bears— all were seasonally nomadic between winter and summer settlements, gathered Arctic plants, and built houses from ice, stone, and animal skins.
A rapidly warming Arctic
This already challenging research is becoming increasingly difficult. The Arctic is warming up to four times faster than the rest of the world.
Extreme weather, from late-season heat waves to harsh blizzards followed by earlier spring snowmelt, are damaging fragile sites. Coastal erosion is swallowing whole settlements along the shore.
Bjarne Gronnow, a research professor in Arctic archeology at the National Museum of Denmark, says he’s seen thirty feet of a Thule settlement in northeast Greenland disappear into the sea in the last decade. More storms and less drift ice allowed stronger waves to batter the shore and wash away loose sediment.
Ground that was once permanently frozen is thawing and suddenly exposing pristine organic artifacts—clothing made of fur and hide, hair, leather, even human and animal remains—to oxygen that decomposes them quickly. Simonsen says that graves that held kayaks, buried with hunters, now hold only the shape of where kayaks once were; mummies found a few decades ago and left undisturbed, are now skeletons as their frozen tissue and skin is exposed to warmer air.
Gronnow calls efforts underway to find and excavate Arctic ruins “rescue archeology.” “But it’s impossible to save all the information from the eroding or thawing sites,” he says.
A number of archeologists I spoke to compared the rate of degradation in the Arctic to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, with everything from tools and clothing to evidence of inter-cultural interaction falling prey to climate change damage.
How did people adapt when the Arctic climate changed?
The archeological record in the Eastern Canadian and Greenland Arctic spans just under 5,000 years of human history and habitation.
That period saw different warming and cooling trends, including the roller coaster swing of the Medieval Warm Period that lasted from 900-1300 CE and was followed by the Little Ice Age.
In response to those dramatic shifts in weather, Arctic people quickly adapted the way they built homes, designed hunting weapons, and traveled, say Baxter and Simonsen.
Early Dorset peoples, for example, built houses with hearths separate from the main room; when the climate cooled a few centuries later, hearths appeared in the middle of the main room to provide heat. Later, as the climate grew even colder, fewer house sites appear on land, suggesting more use of snow houses built on sea ice, which may have made it easier to hunt sea creatures.
But, in one of the mysteries in the Arctic record, the late Dorset peoples of modern Canada and Greenland mysteriously disappeared between five and seven hundred years ago. Baxter says that a few theories for why the culture declined so rapidly relate to the changing climate, “that maybe they weren’t able to quickly or successfully adapt.”
Some believe the late Dorset, which relied on holes in sea ice for hunting seal and narwhal, didn’t adapt to hunting with boats, or land mammals with bow and arrow, when the Medieval Warm Period brought a decline in sea ice.
Meanwhile the Thule culture expanded and thrived. They invented the kayak, a whale bone and seal skin hunting boat built to skim silently over the water, with varying designs for sea conditions. They also invented the norsaq, the lever that allowed throwing a harpoon from a tippy kayak forcibly enough to kill sea mammals as large as walruses and whales.
What can archaeology teach us about modern problems?
Arctic archeologists are still trying to answer a major question: how did climate and culture interact throughout pre-history? And will the answers help us in confronting climate change in the present? Baxter and Simonsen believe some of the lessons have already surfaced.
“Instead of attempting to control and bend the environment to save your own comfort,” says Baxter, “we [need to] change how we exist in that environment, or even where we exist in that environment.”
Today, we seem intent on bending the environment to our comfort: running energy intensive air conditioning units in increasingly hot desert cities, building seawalls along shorelines eroding into the sea, and pumping water out of urban environments that routinely flood.
Simonsen cites a theory that the Norse people disappeared from Greenland not because they couldn’t adapt to the environment, but because they didn’t want to. “They didn’t want to change their culture, and that was a problem. You have to be open minded to adapting.”
As the world enters a new era of climate instability, survival will hinge on our innovation, adaptability, and sustainability—and our willingness to take cues from the cultures who’ve already successfully weathered major climate shifts.
If we can find those clues before it’s too late.
