50 year mystery solved as bodies and lost wreck emerge from glaciers
Topics: Climate Change, History, Science, Travel
Emily Brown
Featured Image Credit: Instagram/Konkordiahutte
Topics: Climate Change, History, Science, Travel
Hikers in Switzerland accidentally stumbled upon long-lost human remains and a plane wreckage as they emerged from melting glaciers.
It was June 1968 when a plane flying above Switzerland came crashing down over the Aletsch glacier, near the Jungfrau and Mönch mountain peaks.
There were three people on board the Piper Cherokee aircraft at the time; a teacher, a chief medical officer, and his son, all from Zurich, and they all sadly died in the crash.
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The bodies of those in the crash were recovered at the time, but the wreckage of the plane was not - and it was left lost in the icy conditions.
It wasn't until August 2022 that a mountain guide named Dominik Nellen spotted an unusual site on the glacier.
"From afar, I thought I was looking at two backpacks," he explained, per The Guardian.
However, upon closer inspection, Nellen realized he was looking at the wreckage of the plane from more than 50 years earlier.
The discovery wasn't the only one made among Switzerland's glaciers that summer, when two heatwaves caused ice in the area to melt and reveal what was hidden beneath.
In the southern canton of Valais, two French mountaineers were attempting to scale the Chessjen glacier when they came across human bones near an old path which had fallen into disuse about a decade earlier.
The alpinists contacted the authorities about the discovery and the skeleton was airlifted from the glacier by helicopter.
Dario Andenmatten, the warden of the Britannia mountain hut where many Alpinists start their ascents, told The Guardian the bones were likely from the 1970s or 80s.
The discovery of the skeleton came one week after another body was found on the Stockji glacier, near the resort of Zermatt.
The body was found by two hikers, one of who told Blick newspaper that the clothes they found around the remains.were neon-coloured, 'in the style of the 80s'.
Hiker Luc Lechanoine added that the body was mummified and slightly damaged, 'but almost complete'.
Authorities were similarly made aware of this discovery and began DNA analysis for both sets of remains.
The year after the discoveries, analysis by the Swiss Academy of Sciences found that glaciers in the country had lost 10 percent of their volume in just two years.
The volume lost on the glaciers in the summers of 2022 and 2023 was determined to be the same as the volume lost between 1960 and 1990.