The retreat of the glacier that exposed Ötzi in 1991 is one of the visible consequences of modern climate change in the Alps.

The glacier that covered the Ötztal hollow for five thousand years is now smaller than it was when Ötzi died there — the warming of recent decades has accomplished what five millennia of natural variation did not: it exposed the hollow, and in doing so it gave the world access to one of the most significant archaeological finds in human history.

The irony that climate change — an environmental crisis — was the mechanism that produced this extraordinary scientific opportunity is not lost on researchers.

The same warming that threatens to expose and rapidly destroy future ice finds was the mechanism that preserved and exposed Ötzi in a condition good enough for analysis.