Raymond Zhong of the New York Times reports that as Alpine ice vanishes faster than any other place on the planet, hurried away by climate change, at least it’s revealing a trove of fascinating, millenia-old human artifacts, including fragments of skis and snowshoes.

One of the most haunting science fiction stories I’ve ever read was “Last Contact” by Stephen Baxter. In it, scientists discover that a universe-ending Big Rip is already well underway, having already nullified larger galaxies and working its way on down the cosmic scale; it will consume everything the size of Earth in mere months. On the other hand, the rapidly fraying laws of physics enable a sudden wealth of extraterrestrial signals. Between that and puzzling out ways to keep recording data even after the Earth is destroyed, scientists at least have something interesting to work on while waiting out the inevitable.

I think about that story often, and I thought of it again today.