Terrible “gifts” are found in melting alpine glaciers: aircraft wreckage, corpses

Global warming on Earth is fraught with numerous consequences. Among them there are those with a plus sign. So, for example, Alpine glaciers retreating over the past years, one after another, give clues to ancient secrets and tragedies. The remains of people who once died in the mountains are thawing out of the ice mass, fragments of equipment that seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Sometimes this leads to very impressive results.

And there is less and less ice on our gradually warming planet. So the main “crown” of Europe – the Alpine mountains, is gradually losing its snow-white decoration. According to information available from the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network, in the past 2022 alone, the volume of ice there has decreased by 6%.

Melting glaciers are thinning, receding, and at the same time, from time to time, they open natural burial places that were previously inaccessible to the thickness – the remains of residents of local villages who disappeared during an unexpectedly ensuing bad weather, climbers who died during the ascent, even planes that crashed on the highlands.

Perhaps the most phenomenal of these “surprises” was the discovery in the 1990s. in Tyrol, at an altitude of 3200 meters, the thawed mummy of a man who lived more than 5000 years ago. The perfectly preserved remains of this representative of a distant era have been carefully studied by scientists since then. More recently, they published a sensational discovery made on the basis of genetic analysis. It turns out that this great-great-great-European was black!

Another terrible discovery in the Alps was made in the middle of this summer. To the south of the Swiss town of Zermatt, on the Theodul glacier, exposed human remains were found, and nearby were fragments of climbing equipment: boots and special crampons attached to them with spikes for walking on a slippery frozen surface. After a police investigation and the results of the work of forensic experts, it turned out that the remains belong to a German climber who went missing in the Alps back in 1986. Commenting on this, the Swiss police said in a statement: “Retreating glaciers are increasingly exposing the remains of mountaineers reported missing decades ago.”

Among such cases is the discovery in August 2015 of the remains of two Japanese climbers who died in the summer of 1970 while climbing one of the most famous Alpine peaks, the Matterhorn. DNA analysis confirmed that they were 22-year-old Michio Oikawa and 21-year-old Masayuki Kobayashi.

In July 2022, on the Stokzhi glacier, not far from one of the ski resorts, tourists stumbled upon body fragments. According to eyewitnesses, the man was wearing clothes in the style of the 80s. And in August, a group of French climbers discovered the melted remains of two more people while passing through the Chessien Glacier in Switzerland.

Mountain glaciers gave up their much older victims in 2017. On July 13, an employee of one of the campaigns serving ski resorts, during the next control bypass of the slopes, noticed some dark objects protruding from a melting glacier. Upon careful examination, it became clear that the find was very terrible: a human leg stuck out of the ice, shod in a boot. Nearby, through the ice layer, another boot, a hat, and some other dark clothes were visible. A block of ice with human remains frozen into it was taken out by helicopter from the mountain slope. After examining the remains, it became clear that they belonged to the Dumoulin spouses from the village of Chandolin. On August 15, 1942, shoemaker Francine Dumoulin and his wife, schoolteacher Marcelin Dumoulin, went from their house to a mountainside to milk the cows grazing there and did not return. Now, 75 years later, one of the surviving daughters of the deceased spouses was finally able to bury her parents, who seemed to have disappeared without a trace.

In 2008, the body of a climber who had fallen into a crevasse back in 1954 was found. And in 2012, the remains of two brothers, who disappeared back in 1926, thawed out of the retreating ice massif.

The Swiss made a sad count some time ago. According to them, over the past hundred years, about 280 people have disappeared without a trace in the Alpine region – local residents, tourists, climbers.

A separate account is for the remains of World War I soldiers stored in an ice sarcophagus. In 1918, in the area of ​​​​the current mountainous Italian village of Peio, a battle took place, known to historians as the “White War”: soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army fought with Italian troops. Snow avalanches, provoked by artillery fire, sometimes covered entire companies here, and many soldiers died, unable to withstand severe frosts. Then, according to historians, tens of thousands of soldiers became victims of the White War. Almost a century later, these people began to return from their icy nothingness. For example, in 2004 alone, three mummified bodies found themselves on the surface of a melting glacier.

Technical comebacks also happen in the Alps.

Not so long ago, fragments of a crashed plane were found in the mountains there. As it turned out, these are traces of a plane crash that happened more than half a century ago. On June 30, 1968, a small Piper Cherokee crashed in the Alps. The bodies of the three people on board were then found, but the aircraft itself disappeared … To “emerge” from the ice several decades later.

The “trophy” returned by the glacier 10 years ago has become unique in its own way. One of the conquerors of Mont Blanc, while climbing the main peak of the Alps, accidentally noticed a metal box protruding from the surface of the Bosson glacier. The contents of it could have delighted anyone: there were pouches marked “made in India.” And in each bag – precious stones: rubies, emeralds and sapphires. Their total weight was about 150 grams. And experts estimated the cost of the miracle find at almost 300 thousand euros.

The honest climber handed over his find to the police. The investigation showed that such an impromptu treasure could have been the result of a plane crash. Just in these places on the slopes of Mont Blanc in 1950 and 1966, two airliners were killed, and by chance both were Indian. Experts came to the conclusion that, most likely, we are dealing with the consequences of the accident of the Boeing 707, which flew from Mumbai to New York and crashed on the southwestern slope of Mont Blanc (this is the territory of France) on January 24, 1966. 117 people died in that tragedy. Apparently, jewelry was transported from India by plane for some private jewelry company.

For several years, the French authorities have been trying to find out who legally owns these treasures. Inquiries were sent to India. However, no convincing evidence has yet been obtained. All this time, the precious stones were in a cell of a bank vault. And in the end, not so long ago, the authorities decided to divide “no man’s” rubies-emeralds, according to the law existing in France, equally and transfer one part to the budget of the capital of the region on whose territory the “ice treasure” was found, and the second part to the person who found it in mountains these values.