Gepatschferner, AustriaHer feet steady on the glacier, Andrea Fischer pulls the blade of her chainsaw in a circle through the ice, shards flying toward her face. Inside the circle: a mummified chamois, an endearing goat-antelope mix perfectly adapted to the Alps. This one was just a kid—a young female no more than two feet tall.

“We believe that she is about 500 years old,” says Fischer, an Alpine glaciologist from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck.

The skin has slid off the animal’s head, pulling one horn with it and laying bare her deep eye sockets, but it’s still stretched taut and leathery over vertebrae and her ribcage. Tufts of walnut-colored