They contacted the relevant authorities.

And a process began that would eventually connect a man who had crossed an alpine icefield centuries ago to seventeen people who donated their DNA to find out whether they were related to him.

The answer — careful, qualified, scientifically specific — was yes.

The Place And The Ice

To understand what was found in the glacier and how it was preserved, you have to understand something about where Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park sits and what the glacial landscape of that region actually is.

The park sits in the extreme northwestern corner of British Columbia, bounded by the Yukon to the north and Alaska to the west.

It is part of one of the largest non-polar ice systems on earth — the vast complex of glaciers, icefields, and mountains that includes Kluane National Park in the Yukon, Wrangell-St.

Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, and Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska.

Together, these four protected areas form a UNESCO World Heritage Site encompassing more than twenty-four million acres of glacier, mountain, and coastal landscape.

The specific area where the remains were found is high country — alpine terrain where glaciers descend from permanent icefields and where the summer melt exposes rock and sometimes older material that had been incorporated into the ice during previous cold periods.

The glacier edge is a dynamic environment: material that was frozen into the ice decades or centuries ago emerges gradually as the ice melts, and the rate at which this happens has increased significantly in recent decades as climate warming has accelerated glacial retreat across the region.

Ice preserves organic material in ways that most other burial environments do not.

The key is the combination of cold, darkness, and the absence of the oxygen that drives decomposition.

When a body is incorporated into a glacier — through burial in snow that compacts to ice, through falling into a crevasse, or through being covered by ice advancing over it — the cold temperatures slow all bacterial activity to near zero.