An interesting discovery was made in Alaska’s Koyukuk River. A group of University of Virginia professors discovered a woolly mammoth trunk along the riverbank while floating down the river.
Adrienne Ghaly (postdoctoral researcher in Environmental Humanities) was able capture the moment in a photo.
Ghaly said, “We are a group of UVA called Sanctuary Lab and we work on climate impacts on cultural and ecological significance.” “We were taken to the middle fork Koyukuk River near Coldfoot in Alaska. My colleague Karen McGlathery saw the tusk despite the river being high and fast.
Ghaly uploaded the image of the tusk she took to Twitter. The post was then shared on Reddit where it became a huge hit with over 1,200 comments.
Ghaly was also joined by Howie Epstein (chair of UVA’s Environmental Science Department).
Epstein stated that the trip was to “basically to study the Arctic, the idea of it as a sanctuary.” As part of our work, we did a river-float trip and the mammoth’s tusk was pointed to us. It’s amazing! It’s amazing! This is not surprising, but it is amazing to actually see in person.
Patrick Druckenmiller is the director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North. He stated that interior Alaska was unaltered during the last glacier.
He said, “It was an ideal place for woolly mammals to live.” “This area is well-known for its large number of ice age mammal remains. This includes mammoth trunks.”
Druckenmiller stated that he would cooperate with the state archaeologist to recover the tusk.
He said, “It doesn’t look like it’s safe to dig it out. But if it did fall out, it would be the right thing to take it to the museum to be curation.”
Professors who witnessed the mammoth’s tusk still remember the amazing sight.
Ghaly says that it was quite arresting to see a mammoth tusk in the riverbank. It’s both extinction and climate change all in one image.
