Alpine glaciers are retreating, and as the ice pulls back it is giving up what it swallowed decades and millennia ago. Glacier archaeologists follow the melt line above 3,000 metres, where the First World War's frontline once ran, recovering equipment that shows how soldiers survived and fought at altitudes better suited to mountaineers than armies. Further down the ice, researchers pull out wooden tools and fragments dated to the Bronze Age, roughly 4,000 years old, offering direct physical evidence of how early alpine communities lived and traveled. The film's most personal thread follows the recovery of a couple who died on a glacier 75 years earlier, their remains preserved by the cold, and their daughter Marceline, who never stopped waiting for them to be found. Interviews with the scientists doing this recovery work sit alongside footage shot on the ice itself, tracking finds as they emerge and get catalogued. The result is a record of what a warming climate is both destroying and, briefly, handing back.