Archaeologists working at the San Miguel de Azapa Museum in Arica, near Chile’s Atacama Desert

Archaeologists working at the San Miguel de Azapa Museum in Arica, near Chile’s Atacama Desert - the driest desert in the world - are scrambling to preserve the region’s glaciated mummies, before they disintegrate into goo. Rising humidity levels in the area have been causing their skin to fall off and their innards to turn into black sludge, despite the fact that the mummies have remained intact in the area for thousands of years, frozen into the region’s permafrost. Scientists believe that this shift in local climate, caused by the fog rolling in off the Pacific Ocean for the past ten years, is due to the effects of climate change. Acting as a sort of natural cryogenic chamber, glaciers across the planet are capable of preserving specimens over long periods of time. Bodies have been found there dating to 3300 BC that were so perfectly preserved that the people who discovered them thought that they were recent murder victims. Cooled by permafrost and seasonal cycles of ice and snow, specimens trapped inside glaciers and ice fields should, theoretically, be preserved forever - but the reality is that they are now melting at an astonishing rate due to climate change. And unfortunately, this process has not taken kindly to mummies that have been unearthed by increasing humidity levels.(Click here to see a previous post of a bog body, and how perfectly preserved it was. You can even see the beard whiskers on his face. #tbt literally one of the very first posts ever on this blog.)(Source) -- source link

More pics about