A ‘Treasury of Ice’ goes on show, revealing relics as Swiss glaciers rapidly melt

LUCERNE, Switzerland (AP) — A bow once used to fire arrows in an ancient hunt. A crunched tube of mayonnaise and a discarded wine bottle. An alpinist’s cracked helmet. A statuette dating back to Roman times. The Glacier Garden in Lucerne is showcasing artifacts like these in a new exhibit of relics that have emerged from Switzerland’s vaunted glaciers over the years, with more expected to come as global warming accelerates the thaw. The exhibit, whose title translates as “Treasury of Ice” from German, comes as Swiss glaciologists recently reported that Switzerland lost 5.5% of its total glacier volume this year, the second-biggest decline on record. “The glaciers are disappearing very, very fast now and before that completely happens, we want to show to the people that this is a very important and interesting archive of what we will lose, unfortunately,” said Andreas Burri, director of the Glacier Garden, an open-air museum. The exhibit features an array of relics — a cow skull, boots, a primitive sort of Swiss army knife, ski gear — as well as videos from Swiss glaciers, charts showing the level of thaw over the years, and a mockup of a glacier flow. Some, Burri says, was just rubbish. “It’s trash. People either lost it or threw it away. We don’t really know for sure,” he said. “But it does give an idea of the variety of things that are now being found as the glaciers melt away.” The remnants from the ice are stacked on…This article was originally published on Mongabay