It was a preserver of a moment — a specific, chosen moment, the moment of the Ice Maiden’s burial — that maintained itself, essentially unchanged, for approximately 2,400 to 2,500 years.

This kind of preservation is not common.

The conditions that produced it — the specific altitude, the specific construction, the specific sequence of events that caused the infiltration and freezing — are unusual enough that the Ice Maiden’s burial is one of only a small number of Pazyryk burials to have preserved organic materials to this degree.

The permanent climate change that is now affecting the Altai Mountains and the broader permafrost zones of Siberia and Central Asia poses a direct threat to whatever preserved materials remain in these burial mounds.

As permafrost thaws — and it is thawing across the Arctic and sub-Arctic at an accelerating rate — the conditions that preserved the Ice Maiden and others like her are being destroyed.