Switzerland’s melting glaciers reveal human remains and plane wreckage | Switzerland
Rising temperatures are causing Switzerland’s melting glaciers to reveal their secrets, with hikers stumbling upon two unidentified human remains and a planewreck this summer that have been missing for more than half a century.
Two French alpinists found human bones last Wednesday while climbing the Chessjen glacier in the southern canton of Valais, a police spokesman confirmed on Monday. On the same day, the skeleton was flown from the glacier by helicopter.
The bones were discovered near an old trail that fell into disuse about 10 years ago, said Dario Andenmatten, the hut warden at Britannia Hut, from which many alpinists start their ascents in the region. The two hikers probably only made their discovery because they relied on an old map.
With only bare bones remaining of the body, Andenmatten said he believed the person died “sometime in the 1970s or 80s.”
Another body had been found a week earlier on the Stockji Glacier near the resort of Zermatt, northwest of the Matterhorn. In both cases, the Valais police said the process of identifying human remains through DNA analysis was still ongoing and would take “a few more days”.
The police in the Alpine region have kept a list of around 300 missing persons since 1925. Among them was the supermarket chain millionaire Karl-Erivan Haub – a triple German, Russian and US citizen who disappeared in the Zermatt region during a ski tour on April 7th 2018. German media have linked the body found on Stockji Glacier to Haub, who was finally pronounced dead in 2021.
However, one of the two hikers who discovered the body told the newspaper Blick that the clothes they found were neon-colored, “in the style of the 80s”. The body was mummified and slightly damaged, “but almost complete,” said Luc Lechanoine, 55.
In the first week of August, a mountain guide discovered the wreckage of an airplane that had crashed in June 1968 over the Aletsch Glacier near the Jungfrau and Mönch mountain peaks.
“From a distance I thought I saw two backpacks,” said Dominik Nellen, 38. Upon closer inspection, the objects turned out to be wreckage from a Piper Cherokee plane that crashed in the area on June 30, 1968 and had an instructor on board. a chief physician and his son, all from Zurich. The bodies were recovered at the time, but the debris was not.
After a relatively snowless winter, the Swiss Alps have already experienced two severe summer heat waves. In July, authorities advised alpinists against climbing the Matterhorn because of unusually high temperatures, which reached almost 30C in Zermatt.
During the July heatwave, the height at which the water froze was measured at a record 5,184 meters, compared to normal summer levels of 3,000 to 3,500 meters.