The result was effectively a natural freezer, maintaining a stable cold environment that prevented bacterial decomposition for approximately 2,400 to 2,500 years.

When Polosmak’s team encountered the burial, they found the outer chamber — the space between the burial pit walls and the coffin — had been robbed at some point in antiquity.

The robbers who dug the shaft looking for valuables had inadvertently created the water infiltration pathway that would eventually seal the inner chamber in ice.

The robbery that was meant to empty the tomb had, by a chain of unintended consequences, helped preserve its most extraordinary contents.

This irony — that the tomb robbers’ intrusion created the conditions for preservation — is one of the genuinely stranger aspects of the Ice Maiden’s story.