Melting Alpine Ice Unveils Decades-Old Corpses

Yahoo News ^ | August 28, 2003

[NYer]

A Swiss father who searched for his mountaineer son's missing body for 18 years thought his quest had paid off this week when a glacier, thawing in Europe's record heat, gave up a corpse.

The young son and a companion vanished in 1985 while scaling the Titlis peak in the central Swiss Alps. Officials concluded strong winds blew them off the mountainside as they bivouacked.

The man's father, who police have not named, made dozens of trips to the area to seek his remains over the years, finding nothing but bits of equipment.

But police said Thursday he had discovered a corpse the day before that had been uncovered by a receding ice pack.

"Yesterday (the father) thought it was his son. Today he says it is the friend," a police spokesman said. "I would leave this wide open for the moment ... We don't know if it is the body of his son, his son's companion or someone else."

Several other people have gone missing in the area over the years. The decomposed body was given to forensics experts for tests.

Thawing Alpine ice has yielded several bodies this summer.

German hiker Helmut Weiss, last seen in 1971, was found this week at an altitude of 8,860 feet near Ischgl in Austria, German police said Thursday.

A group of German hikers came upon his decomposed upper body Tuesday, protruding 32 inches from the ice. He was identified by items in his wallet.

Austrian Police said the bodies of an Austrian and Canadian had been also found in the mountainous Tyrol province alone.

In July, hikers discovered the body of a German woman missing since 1956 near Kaprun in another part of Austria.

"Maybe we will even find a new Oetzi," a German police spokesman said, referring to a mummified 5,000-year-old corpse whose discovery in Alpine ice in 1991 caused a sensation.

Hikers who found "Oetzi" first mistook him for an unlucky mountaineer.

[NYer]

Oetzi The Iceman

[ClearCase_guy]

I've always wondered what happened to him.

[Blueflag]

Mr. Iceman to you.

[tbpiper]

I'm you're hucklberry.

[Redcloak]

More global warming... It's all George W. Bush's fault!

[marsh2]

Splain me this...if the thaw uncovered bodies that had been buried in recent decades at ground levels beneath snowpack levels of recent years, doesn't that indicate that we have had more snow rather recently than usual in those areas. Doesn't this mean we are back to the same level as a few decades ago? That sounds like a normal cycle to me, not new levels of global warming.

[ChemistCat]

You're right.

The global warming fanatics never took any thermodynamics....nor statistics! In fact, I'm willing to bet that few among them have taken any hard science or math courses at all, even at the high school level.

[kidd]

This global warming theory confuses me

[CdMGuy]

Exactamundo. Interesting that the bodies of people missing from the 50s and 70s are showing up. Unless they made one hell of an indentation in the snow pack, it says to me that there was less snowpack during those years.

Everything goes in cycles climate-wise. For example, the weather in coastal Southern California had changed significantly during the 33 years I have lived here. Our Summers used to be dry and cool with no clouds for day after day. Now, our Summers are far more humid, thunderhead clouds in the mountains with afernoon rain, clouds and fog along the coast. For one thing, the ocean water is warmer. As a result, warm, moist tropical air is pulled up from Mexico. Wait another 30 years and things will return to dry, clear weather.

[Redcloak]

It sounds like they were in areas that were covered in ice and snow at the time. We've been in a warming period for the past century or two so it's likely that these areas have simply been abnormally cold for the past few decades; they're now catching up with the rest of the region.