Soaring temperatures are prompting Switzerland’s melting glaciers to reveal their secrets, with hikers this summer chancing upon two sets of unidentified human remains and a plane wreckage lost for more than half a century.
Two French alpinists found human bones last Wednesday while scaling the Chessjen glacier in the southern canton of Valais, a police spokesperson confirmed on Monday. The skeleton was airlifted from the glacier by helicopter on the same day.
The bones were discovered near an old path that fell into disuse about 10 years ago, said Dario Andenmatten, the warden of the Britannia mountain hut from where many Alpinists start their ascents in the region. The two hikers probably only made their discovery because they were relying on an old map.
Since little remained of the body other than bare bones, Andenmatten said he expected the person to have died “sometime in the 1970s or 80s”.
A week earlier, another body had been found on the Stockji glacier near the resort of Zermatt, north-west of the Matterhorn. In both cases, Valais police said the process of identifying human remains through DNA analysis was still underway and would take “a few more days”.
Read more: yahoo
