160-Year-Old Soup Can Shows Arctic Explorers Were Slurping Lead

It's amazing what artifacts you can find buried in the ice. (No I'm not talking about that leftover turkey that's been in your freezer since last Thanksgiving. Though if you consider that an historical find, more power to you.) Last month Discoblog brought you the story of the century-old whiskey that British explorer Ernest Shackleton left on Antarctica, which New Zealanders recovered and plan to replicate. Now scientists have analyzed a soup can found in the Canadian Arctic that dates to around the time of the famous Franklin Expedition, and could point to how its members met their doom. Franklin, an Englishman, took two ships on an attempt to sail the Northwest Passage, but disappeared with the loss of all hands, leaving a long-lived mystery about how they died. The soup can, however, shows lead levels "off the scale," suggesting lead poisoning as a likely cause of the expedition's gloomy end. From the Times Colonist: