What The Ice Was Hiding

The Ukok Plateau sits at roughly 2,400 meters above sea level in the Altai Mountains, near the point where the borders of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia converge.

It is remote in the way that very few places on Earth are still remote.

The plateau is windswept and largely treeless, cut by cold rivers, home to the kind of silence that comes only where there are no roads and no permanent buildings and almost no people.

In summer it opens briefly into something beautiful — alpine meadows, clear skies, the distant peaks of the mountains marking all four horizons.

In winter it is brutal.

It is also ancient burial ground.

For centuries, the people of the Altai have known this.

The plateau is scattered with kurgans — the burial mounds of steppe nomads who lived here two and a half thousand years ago.

The mounds rise from the grassland, many of them long since looted by grave robbers, the depressions at their centers marking where someone dug in centuries ago looking for metal and gold.

In the summer of 1993, a team of Russian archaeologists led by Dr.

Natalia Polosmak of Novosibirsk’s Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography was digging at one such kurgan.

They had been on the plateau for more than two months, working through the Siberian summer in a landscape that gave up its secrets slowly and reluctantly.

They found six horses first.

The animals were buried near the outer chamber of the kurgan, still in their harnesses, the marks of pickaxes on their skulls indicating they had been killed — sacrificed, most likely — as part of a burial ritual.

The meat of the horses was still present in the permafrost, 2,500 years old and in an advanced state of decay, filling the air with a stench that the archaeologists described as overwhelming.

Then they encountered the ice.

A large block of it, solid and clear, filling the inner chamber of the burial mound.