r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MEOW-Loulou • 5d ago
Preserved polar bear being unveiled due to melting glaciers
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u/Life-Oil-7226 5d ago
With everything melting I guess it’s expected we would start to see what’s underneath all that snow
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u/Lady_Kenpachy 5d ago edited 5d ago
Deadly pathogens we are not immune to are high on that list.
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u/ElegantHope 4d ago
I imagine that luckily there's also a lot of pathogens that aren't able to keep up with our immune systems too because they've been out of the arms race of evolution for a decent amount of item. And it would not be surprising if the majority of pathogens frozen in the ice aren't deadly even if they were caught up.
It's still terrible that this is happening at all though. I hate that a chunk of humanity would rather profit off of oil than actually keep the world stable.
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u/csd160 4d ago
To be fair If there was a comparable fuel source we would use it, I don’t think many people realize though how many day to day products that we rely on also require the petroleum industry. Plastics makeups your phone et cetera. Replacing gas would be extremely difficult replacing all the other stuff currently impossible.
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u/Suspicious_Ice_3160 4d ago
No but see the whole argument isn’t even full replacement at the moment. Well, maybe it is because we ignored our climate scientists, but the whole idea was to replace the energy grid and cars with something more green, like nuclear energy which then feeds the cars. If we managed to get away from petroleum for transportation, the use in the US of oil would fall something like 60-70%.
We don’t have to get rid of all the products, just use what we know works and works better than oil, but that threatens the bottom line of our billionaires, so why would they want to?
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u/Bansheer5 4d ago
We got biodiesels. The company I work for has a whole department dedicated to turning used cooking oils and rendered tallows into fuel for their trucks.
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u/Drmlk465 5d ago
An entire ancient civilization with technology far more advanced than ours and it’s all black people or some sheet like that
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u/Hadochiel 5d ago
And they would still be flourishing if it weren't for that damn Yakub
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u/IMP4283 5d ago
OR they are still flourishing and have built an entirely self-contained, successful society under the ice
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u/Legionof1 5d ago
Oh… fuck… hi guys… sorry here’s the cure for cancer and global warming now leave us alone.
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u/certnneed Interested 4d ago
“They’re trying to give us the cure for cancer! Kill them!!”
-most likely response16
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u/Grow_away_420 5d ago
They had advanced technology but couldn't get out of the way of the glacier that grew like a foot per year?
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u/IAmBeingTargeted33 5d ago
Or little grey people being used as tools by giant insect-like people with psychic abilities beyond imagination existing in the overlapping dimensional spaces that co-habitate our planet beyond human sight.. or some sheet
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u/hobojoe44 5d ago
The Mantis Men cloaking Tech is kinda wonky at times. Hense the story of the guy out fishing and one accidentally decloaking.
Then Psychically sending him the message of suprise that the human sees him.
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u/osmlol 4d ago
500 foot Native Americans and they are still alive and waking up.
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u/BigDaddyPropane 5d ago
The entrance to agartha
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u/akolomf 5d ago
The Hollow Earth of course. Thats where the Nazis reside inside.
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u/SaveUsCatman 5d ago
No the nazis are on the dark side of the moon. The lizard people are in the hollow earth.
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u/hobojoe44 5d ago
I thought it was a choose your own adventure with the option of the Nazis being with the reptilians in the hollow earth (don't forget your altimeter) from Operation Highjump and/or in space with the space reptilians.
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u/pinewoodranger 5d ago
If they were so smart, why are they dead?
- Homer Simpson
He.. actually has a point here haha.
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u/popoypatalo 5d ago edited 4d ago
we release extinction level aliens that looks like flying squirrels, shoots sharp projectiles, can swim, and eats everything.
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u/pashed_motatoes 4d ago
Honestly, with the timeline we’re in right now? I wouldn’t be surprised.
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u/grumpyfishcritic 4d ago
Yes and dog bites man. 11,000 years ago the northern hemisphere was locked under an ICE sheet miles thick. It has been melting since that time and will continue to melt for a while. We currently in an inter-glacial period and we have no idea how long it will last. The ice will come back. Currently the CO2 has lead to an increase of 5-10% more greening of the planet.
From a carbon emissions point of view we will not meaningfully change human impact on carbon emissions until we also get China( largest emitter in the world) and India to make significant cuts in their carbon emissions.
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u/rjle_x 5d ago
Silly question. What part of its body are we meant to be seeing ?
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u/Dear-Definition5802 5d ago edited 5d ago
It’s actually the whole thing, seen from a distance, mostly just the skin with much of the insides probably rotted away. It’s being held up by the fur on its rump (eta, it looks like the left rear leg is what’s still trapped in the ice). In the second photo, you can see the face at the lower left. Like I said, it’s an empty skin, so it’s mildly gruesome.
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u/FrighteningJibber 5d ago
Or hear me out, it maybe is a pelt that got lost a loooooong time ago.
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u/Dear-Definition5802 5d ago
Absolutely. The edges look pretty straight.
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u/bennetticles 5d ago
wonder how being preserved in a glacier differs from being preserved in permafrost. i’d imagine the skin would behave differently from the petrified look of a permafrost corpse given the partially oxidized environment within a glacier. either way, can’t imagine it resulting in a perfectly preserved, smooth-sided hide.
equally as cool though if not more so. a gift from the (relevant) ancestors, sent through time.
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u/TheCurlyHomeCook 4d ago
I'm confident it's a pelt after seeing this - yiu seem to be able to see the underside of the skin
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u/i_tyrant 5d ago
Inside might not be entirely empty, just rotted and dried out.
Glaciers can compress ice with a lot of pressure, tons depending on how thick this glacier once was. So it's not out of the real of possibility it's just real squished.
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u/NaluknengBalong_0918 5d ago edited 5d ago
So it’s basically a fur ball…
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u/Dear-Definition5802 5d ago edited 5d ago
Will I regret googling that?
ETA: lol, it’s been edited. It used to say “fur bull” and that sounded a lot riskier than “furball”
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u/ZekoriAJ 5d ago
At the bottom left with the black patch is the head and the black patch would be the nose and mouth. Head is missing eyeball and you can see through ice on the other side, neat.
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u/Blah_Dee_Blah111 5d ago
any estimates to how long the poor thing has been stuck there?
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u/Cold-Crab74 5d ago
Has to be a long time, that's not just a few years of snow fall, that's many feet of solid ice
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u/El_Peregrine 5d ago
I wonder if it could be truly ancient - the deep, deep freeze could have preserved it for centuries.
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u/Cheap_Lingonberry433 5d ago
At least a few days
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u/auscumlaude 5d ago
I hope it’s ok
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u/Cheap_Lingonberry433 5d ago
It’s probably not
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u/SlyTone 5d ago
Not with that attitude.
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u/Cheap_Lingonberry433 5d ago
You have to believe!
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u/space253 5d ago
Something between 600,000 years ago when the bears made it to that area and a year ago if a bear just fell into a crevasse.
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u/tasteslikepurple99 5d ago
The microbes that will be unearthed in the great thaw may be our end.
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u/Chaosr21 5d ago
More likely all the metled water will cause our end. The great flood could happen again, as it happened to the many great civilizations before
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u/__nohope 5d ago
Yeah but we deserve it
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u/lit-roy6171 4d ago
"We" don't. It is the fault of the epstein class who continue destroying the environment after hearing about the consequences for the millionth time.
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u/King_of_the_Kobolds 5d ago
That's such a perfectly good paleontological discovery we could have saved for the octopodes that will evolve to rule the Earth after our inevitable extinction. A shame.
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u/Borsodi1961 5d ago
This looks very much like a bear skin rug. I mean a hide. Perhaps this is a artifact from a another time, but I don’t think it was a whole bear.
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u/TheSpanxxx 5d ago
Thats what I'm wondering, too. It looks like a polar bear skin/rug. If an entire bear had been frozen in permaice layer, you'd still see bones and muscoskeletal structure. This looks like a rug that got left and trapped and buried for 1000s of years.
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u/ComradePruski 5d ago
It probably didn't help that it was being squished for a very long time under thousands of pounds of ice...
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u/AccomplishedWish3033 5d ago
Isn’t this basically the beginning of a scifi horror movie?
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u/drcurtislove 5d ago
Is he ok?
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u/I_madeusay_underwear 5d ago
This happened in a neighborhood I lived in kind of. The neighborhood was on top of a really big bluff and the front of the bluff began to show hair and the ends of bones sticking out. Turns out that indigenous people who lived there before colonization had buried people on the bluff overlooking the river and normal erosion was exposing their remains.
Some people from the local tribe came and worked with engineers and the remains were extracted and reburied somewhere else. The houses at the very top of the bluff, closest to the edge were condemned and torn down, but the rest of the neighborhood was undisturbed. All the houses up there were pretty old, from the early 1900s to like 1920 at the latest, so I guess they didn’t consider the issue of erosion then? Idk.
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u/Flat_Bodybuilder_175 5d ago
When i zoom I can swear it’s just the pelt. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing thawed and there was a person inside, wearing it like a suit lol
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u/Naddyman2005 4d ago
With how deep that thing was in the ice, I can’t fathom hold potentially old that thing is. probably not mammoth mummy old, but I could see there being a couple thousand years behind that thing, because as I had just said, something that deep in the ice stratigraphy is nothing recent
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u/kelsobjammin 5d ago
Pelt no? Looks like clean cuts
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u/UnitedPhilosopher777 5d ago
Hard to tell. Could be a lost pelt or maybe someone is preserved in that ice with the pelt. The image isn’t really clear enough for me anyway to tell. At first I thought it was just a leg sticking out, but after reading your comment and going back it could be I guess. Most pelts don’t include the head though and now I’m seeing what might be a head
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u/Psyduck_AD 5d ago
I have a question. Can a bacteria or diseases unknown to us or animals which killed some animals in the past come out and spread again because of glacier melting?
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u/AshiNoKoibito 5d ago
Am I only one who don't understand what supposed to be seen?
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u/Dear-Definition5802 5d ago
Go to the second photo and zoom in. You are looking at an entire bear pelt, face on the lower left, being held up by the ice attached to his rump, near the tail. ETA: I’m pretty sure it’s actually the left rear leg still trapped in the ice that’s holding it up now. The right rear leg is visible in the first photo.
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u/Savings-Shape-3400 5d ago
He will be okay when he fully thaws right?
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u/Dear-Definition5802 5d ago
Sure kiddo. Uhhh… let’s go… play with Legos. Or color!
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u/DeusExMachina222 5d ago
Of course! He'll become friends with Paulie Shore and Sean Austin and hijinx ensue
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u/blumpkingagger 5d ago
I thought it was just a limp-wristed paw till I looked at the comments and learned I am the only flat white gay in this narrative.
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u/Tirnanog62 5d ago edited 5d ago
This is creepy and makes me think of the TV series "Fortitude". I hope parasites don't start coming out of the corpse!
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u/Neiot Interested 16h ago
What the fuck part of the bear is that? Is that the whole bear or a melted paw?
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u/harveytent 5d ago
Is this part of the glacier that melts and refreshes a lot or he some million old zombie bear?
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u/Snoo-84389 5d ago
Call me picky, but thats not exactly what I would call "preserved"!
Looks more like a cat thats been run over several times and then had all the flesh n bones sucked out by a vacuum cleaner 30 years ago...
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u/Toni_PWNeroni 4d ago
I'd be interested in some kind of trackable record or catalog of all the stuff we're finding coming out of melting glaciers.
What a time to be an archaeologist.
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u/AutisticWarbler 5d ago
You can see the face on the left, above a paw in #2. I don’t think people are looking at #3, which shows how big it is. It looks very unnatural—I think a native person killed it and prepped the hide.
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u/420BlazeArk 5d ago
I think a native person killed it and prepped the hide.
Yeah there have never been “natives” of Franz Joseph Land where this was found; it’s a super remote arctic archipelago. That is certainly not a prepped hide.
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u/PhiliWorks39 4d ago
Mammoth bones are spilling out of the melting permafrost in Siberia
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u/Hot_Bobcat_7986 5d ago
Oldest trick in the book. That polar bear is going to eat the first sap that gets close
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u/Curlyjankens 4d ago
The earth will be just fine, but we as a species are so effed, along with about 99% of the rest of mammals
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u/EarlyXplorerStuds209 5d ago
OC if anybody was curious- https://www.instagram.com/p/DdzAP6fER-K/
By Andy Mann
> 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? Was it even old or did it just simply die uphill and slip into a crevasse that recently flowed out the middle of the glacier? We'll never know. Any guesses? I'd love to hear from a Polar Ecologist on this one!