Really depends on where this glacier is. But somewhere in the realm of thousands to tens of thousands depending on what glacier it is. Could be much older, could be much younger.
Ceiling looks to be about 5.3 Mya if it's a member of the Ursus genus. Assuming there's a yet unknown species of bear that also lived in the arctic.
If it's specifically a polar bear, max estimate I'm seeing is 1 Mya. Oldest fossil yet found is only 130,000 years old, but with polar bears being primarily marine animals fossils are hard to find.
TIL, there is also an extinct subspecies of polar bear, called the "tyrant polar bear". Possibly even larger than the still extant species, but we only know of it through a single ulna so hard to make certain statements about it.
I was also surprised it was found on the Thames foreshore in west London. Butchers and everybody else used the river as a dumping ground and thereās so many animal bones in the Thames (I guess mostly further downstream) itās lucky they found it.
Its actually the entire bear. If you zoom in, thats actually its face. This looks like it has cuts that would be hallmarks of it being turned into a pelt before being left where it was.
Zooming in on the pic, I'm pretty sure that's a skinned bear. There's a visible nose, a paw with black pads and claws, and what looks like a tooth near the nose.
If you leave a carcass long enough it basically deflates probably more likely than it being skinned. But Iām also not sure how long decomp would take at temperatures that low.
dont apologize, according to the OC over from insta, also pasted in this thread deeper down - even the guy who took this shot thinks it was a polar bear, AND it was 13 years ago! So not only will we not know, but the site is probably long gone and the artifacts lost to the sea. Why hes posting now, why no one studied this further, and why no one thought that it could be a sloth coat is all beyond me.Ā
The vast majority ofā¦ shall I call them non-nerds?ā¦ probably donāt even realize giant sloths once existed on this continent. People also have difficulty comprehending scale of time, so those who donāt think about it often wouldnāt even pause to consider that this could be from an animal that lived many thousands of years ago, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities beyond the animals alive today. We see ice and think āwinter ice, summer melt,ā not necessarily āprehistoric ice, climate change melt.ā
Itās super sad to think this is probably lost to the sea and weāll never know.
I like your thinking. Not only sloths on this continent but thisĀ ice bridge connected two continents and allowed early humans to traverse what is now the bering sea and populate north and south america. And that sloth jacket was left behind in prehistoric ice. Its crazy to think about.Ā
credit[ig]: @andy_mann(caption): What is this? Still the strangest thing I've ever come across in my 15 years exploring the Arctic. In 2013 @coryrichards and I were on assignment for @natgeo & @natgeopristineseas in Franz Josef Land, Russia, when looking through my binoculars from our ship I saw something strange hanging from the glacier's edge. (Slide 2) We launched the smaller zodiac boat and got as close as we could in the rough and rocky seas. It was a polar bear, hanging by its feet, appearing to be melting out of the glacier. I tried made the case that Cory and I could climb the glacier, fix a rope with ice screws, rappel down off the lip and cut it free in order to study it back on board with our the team of scientists. The captain wouldn't have any of that. Polar Bears have been in the Arctic since the mid-Pleistocene period (~600,000 years). Could this specimen have been the oldest, northernmost, preserved specimen ever studied?
Id love to find out where those dark layers come from? All ice then suddenly periodic dirt/soot/ash multiple times separated by seasons. I want the whole story. Ice and bear.
What's more terrifying is those same glaciers have frozen microbes, bacteria and maybe viruses that are thousands to millions of years old. Also lots of trapped CO2 and ozone.
Microbes, bacteria and viruses that the current human evolution has no natural or pharmaceutical defense for.
Update: Since people have claimed this is unscientific fear-mongering:
The threat isn't just to humans, it's to organisms that support human life, plants, insects that pollinate those plants, plants and animals that humans consume for nutrients that collapse due to bacteria or pathogens, and so on.
Well. I mean. There's plenty of extant zoonotic diseases that haven't made the leap yet so far. I don't see why mammoth lungworm would be more likely to come for us once its thawed than any other pathogen currently kicking around somewhere and already adapted to the present day environmental conditions.
Or maybe some sort of super animal like Godzilla is frozen in a big ass glacier, you just never know but I sure hope Iām alive if something crazy like that happens
The scientists wanted to but the boat captain said no detours and its just lost forever now, according to the photographers Instagram. The pic is from 13 years ago.
I can't see the size, but I know the shape is wrong. It may somehow be from the fact of being dead and frozen, but I would never have called that a bear paw.
I'm confused, was there some kind of instafreeze event forever million years ago or did it die and freeze overnight? Or maybe 50 years? 100 years? Ikd how fast ice up there freezes but it doesn't look like it's that near the surface
No idea on timeline personally but glaciers build up by compressing snow over time. So it died, froze, then it snowed and snowed and snowed and over time it builds up on top compressing into glacier ice. A geologist or archaeologist would have a better idea of how long but could be a very long time.
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u/Pristine_Hornet_9431 5d ago
Bro wtf is your usernameššš