Mountain climber’s remains identified nearly 6 decades after he fell from glacier in Austria

The remains of a man discovered near an Austrian glacier have been identified as those of a German mountaineer who died almost 60 years ago, local police said on Thursday.

Climate change has accelerated the melting of glaciers, with the retreating ice releasing bodies of climbers it has held for years, often decades.

The German man’s bones, including part of a leg, were discovered last year in the Tyrol province in western Austria.

He was reported missing in March 1967 after he fell into a crevasse while crossing the Wasserfallferner glacier on skis with a companion, local police told AFP.

Search teams were unable to retrieve him from the deep crevasse at the time and bad weather forced them to break off the rescue mission.

In August 2024, a local inhabitant found the bones about 2,300 feet below the glacier in the Rotmoostal valley and alerted authorities.

After carrying out extensive DNA analyses of the human remains, forensic experts could “attribute them to a 30-year-old German from the Baden-Wuerttemberg region” who has been missing since 1967, police said.  

“In recent years, the receding of glaciers across the Alps — in this case the Wasserfallferner glacier — has resulted in the discoveries of remains of sometimes long-missing mountaineers,” police spokesman Erwin Voegele told AFP.

“Such finds have also happened in neighbouring Switzerland and Italy but it is rare that the remains can be identified almost 60 years after the accident,” Voegele added.

Austria is in danger of becoming largely “ice free” within 45 years, the country’s Alpine Club warned last year, reporting that in 2023 two glaciers shrank by more than 100 meters.

Melting glaciers reveal remains of hikers, climbers

As glaciers increasingly melt and recede, which many scientists blame on global warming, there has been an increase in discoveries of the remains of hikers, skiers and other Alpinists who went missing decades ago.

Last July, the preserved body of an American mountaineer William Stampfl — who disappeared in 2002 while scaling a snowy peak in Peru — was found after being exposed by climate change-induced ice melt.

was reported missing in June 2002, aged 59, when an avalanche buried his climbing party on the mountain Huascaran, which stands more than 22,000 feet high. 

In September 2023, the remains of a German climber who went missing in 1971 were discovered on a Swiss glacier.Two months before that, the remains of another German climber who went missing in 1986 were also discovered in Switzerland. Police did not identify that climber but published a photo of a hiking boot and gear sticking out of the snow that apparently belonged to the missing man.

In August 2017, Italian mountain rescue crews recovered the remains of hikers on a glacier on Mont Blanc’s southern face likely dating from the 1980s or 1990s.

The month before that, a shrinking glacier in Switzerland revealed the bodies of a frozen couple who went missing in 1942.