Scientists have found been finding frozen objects buried and preserved in ice for years and years. And some of them are stranger than others. And some of those stranger items happen to be so bizarre that they leave scientists baffled. Sure, some of these findings are from the ice age, but some simply unexplainable. These are some of the more mysterious and in intriguing findings that scientists have discovered over the years. Prepare yourselves!
Lighthouse Frozen in Time
People who live in the warm areas of the world don’t really know just how freezing the cold can get. It can get so cold that the surrounding architecture will literally freeze. This is surprisingly common in Michigan, actually. This lighthouse you see in the photo succumbed to the cold, so to speak.
This is one of those images that you would wonder for a moment if it’s even real, or if it was PhotoShopped. But I assure you; it wasn’t. Now, I can only imagine what those temperatures would cause to a human being. So let’s be thankful that no human was there at the time.
Mammoth Brains. Mmmm
One of the more surprising things that scientists found in ice is the brains of a woolly mammoth. The mammoth wasn’t found in an ice patch but rather some abandoned permafrost that was left behind on the coast of the Laptev Sea.
Until today, this is actually one of the only preserved species of the mammoth to be found with an intact brain. It’s around 39,000 years old, which makes it even more remarkable. This mammoth was also a child of around six to nine years old.
Frozen Mr. Fox
Not all things found in ice are of the prehistoric age. Modern animals can freeze in ice just like those from the ice age. Take this fox, for example, which was found completely frozen in a block of ice. The fox was found by a hunter at a German lake.
And this fox wasn’t the first found by this hunter. He also claims to have found frozen wild deer and wild boar. Whether or not it’s true, what we do know is that the fox is displayed as an arctic member at a German hotel.
There have been cases where scientists find animals in ice that aren’t even dead. And it can be due to normal changes in the environment. Certain alligators, like this one, can survive in ice for the duration of an entire winter.
For whatever reason, their biology allows them to preserve their internal organs in the ice cold waters. In places where we would die of frostbite, an alligator might thrive, or at least survive. Being in the frozen state of temporary hibernation lets them survive these temperamental conditions.
What Was a Plane…
Other items found in ice are pieces of planes that have crashed. While it’s not ancient, this finding is still a surprise. It was long presumed lost. But in 1952, the military plane bound for Anchorage, Alaska came up too short, crashing into a glacier.
The crash sadly killed 41 passengers and 11 crew members. But because the conditions were too unstable (as it goes with glaciers), police and rescue workers couldn’t access any of the wreckage. It took 50 years of melting for the glacier to reveal what was left and enable rescue workers to salvage the remains.