Glaciers yield bodies of long-dead climbers

Human remains surfacing as ice recedes in warmer climate

One night in August 1970, two young Japanese climbers set up a tent in the Swiss Alps. They wanted to rest up for the next day’s ascent up the Matterhorn glacier, when a sudden snowstorm took them by surprise, police told Reuters.

The climbers vanished and, for decades, it seems, were entombed in ice. Authorities said Thursday they identified the remains last month of 21-year-old Masayuki Kobayashi and 22-year-old Michio Oikawa, who had been found on the glacier. Over the years, bones belonging to humans have turned up, experts say, as rising temperatures melt their frozen tombs.

“More and more regularly,” Valais Canton police said in a statement, “the receding of glaciers permits the discovery of missing climbers after dozens of years.”

Experts say global warming is playing a role in the discovery of remains.

Prehistoric remains typically emerge as temperatures rise and stagnant ice begins to disappear, giving up artifacts buried below, Albert Hafner, director of the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bern in Switzerland, told the Washington Post.

The most famous find came in 1991 when hikers discovered the remains of Otzi, a 5,300-year-old man known as the ice man, in Italy’s Otztal Alps.

Modern hikers and climbers, however, typically vanish by falling into crevasses in the mountains — “a deep freezer,” Hafner said. The remains are transported by glaciers over time and resurface during the movement.

Archeologist Martin Callanan said the emergence of modern remains is “a sign that things are changing.” Without global warming, he said, some remains would still melt out — but others would not. “They get encapsulated in ice and you won’t find them until it melts,” he said. The phenomenon has become so common that glacial archeologists have emerged to study it. “It’s a new and emerging sub-discipline,” said Callanan, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

In recent years, remains have surfaced from Russia’s icy floor to frozen fields in the Yukon, starting to decompose decades after death, McClatchy reported.

In 2013, a rescue pilot stumbled upon bones and belongings of British climber Jonathan Conville, 27, who vanished near the Matterhorn in 1979. This year, mountaineers found remains from Chilean soccer players who died in 1961 when their plane went down in the Andes en route to Santiago.

Indeed mountain climbers disappear every year into the world’s frozen peaks. But Mount Everest is perhaps the most notorious with the trek to its summit, dubbed the “death zone,” a graveyard littered with some 200 corpses.