Archeologists in Chile have discovered a 5,500-year-old grave in the Atacama Desert, acknowledged to be the driest place on Earth with an annual rainfall of less than one millimeter. It is so dry that there is virtually no plant or animal life. The barren red landscape could easily be mistaken for Mars. Curiously, the Bronze Age man had been buried on top of a mound of sea shells and forensic scientists determined the cause of his death was drowning. Nearby harpoons and fishhooks suggest he had been a fisherman.
With temperatures this spring already climbing near 100 F., it feels like climate change could be speeding up. Our garden is withering under the relentless sun, forcing us to water even though it’s spring, a time when water is supposed to come from the sky. But we are adapting. Our greyhound, Argos is also adaptable. When it’s hot, he refuses to go outside and just sleeps most of the day. To be honest, he does that in the winter, too. Argos used to be a professional racer and now he has become perfectly adapted to retirement.
And speaking of 5,500 years ago, scientists are reporting that the loss of Antarctic sea ice is at its highest level since the end of the Stone Age. Back then, the first wheeled vehicle was just invented. It marked the first instance of written language. Mummification in Ancient Egypt was brand new technology. The Thwaites Glacier, the world’s largest is losing 50 billion tons of ice every year, double that of 30 years ago. Also known as the “Doomsday Glacier”, if Thwaites melts, it could flip the conveyer belt of ocean currents that draws warm water up from the tropics to the North Atlantic, bringing about a new ice age in Europe.
Climbers at Mount Everest are having to move their base camp lower down the mountain because their old camp site is melting. They have reported hearing loud crunching and cracking noises from melting ice and crumbling rocks. Some say crevasses have opened up under their tents while they slept.
Polar bears are adapting to climate change. The have typically hunted by waiting near holes in the ice for seals to come up for air. But with glacial ice disappearing, the bears are learning to hunt off of floating blocks of freshwater ice. Or, they wander into villages in Alaska and scavenge out of dumpsters. If a 10-foot-tall bear wants to eat your leftover KFC and Captain Crunch, what are you going to do about it?
There is a variety of pink salmon that is adapting to warmer temperatures by migrating two weeks earlier than it did even forty years ago, allowing their population to remain constant.
A strain of the herb thyme is adapting to the warmer winters in Southern France by producing stronger smelling oils that herbivores find distasteful. Or maybe it’s the name—Thymus vulgaris. What self-respecting rabbit would want to eat a vulgar herb?
I keep thinking about that guy in the Chilean desert, buried on a pile of sea shells. Could that be an ancient warning about the threat of changing climates? Or had Atacama always been a desert and were the sea shells and fishhooks somebody’s idea of a joke?