Melting Swiss Glacier Reveals Climbers Missing Since 1992

The discovery was made possible by the steady shrinking of Alpine ice. Rising temperatures have accelerated the melting of glaciers, and as the ice thins and retreats it releases what it has held for decades. Wallis police keep a register of missing persons that reaches back to 1925, made up largely of people lost in the high mountains and in rivers, and they noted in their statement that the remains of those who vanished many years ago are now emerging repeatedly. Similar cases have multiplied across the region and beyond: in 2023 a German hiker missing for almost four decades was found in the Theodul Glacier, and last year the bones of a Swiss climber who disappeared in 1994 surfaced on the Ober Gabelhorn, also in Wallis. Outside Europe, a melting glacier in Pakistan gave up a man's body 28 years after he was lost, and the remains of a British researcher who vanished in Antarctica in 1959 were uncovered near a receding glacier in 2025.

The identification turns an unsolved disappearance that had lasted more than three decades into a documented death. For the authorities in Wallis, the case is another entry on a growing list; their statement said that the retreat of glaciers means the remains of people who vanished long ago are being revealed repeatedly. The same pattern is visible far beyond the Alps: bodies held by ice for decades have surfaced in Antarctica and Pakistan within the past two years. The two mountaineers now pass from the ice into a closed file, their 1992 disappearance settled by a comparison of DNA profiles.