Bodies of two hikers missing for decades found after Swiss glacier melts

The bodies of two Belgian hikers who disappeared in the Swiss Alps in 1992 have been uncovered after glacial melt exposed them on the Trift Glacier south of Lucerne, authorities said. A hiker located the remains on 26 July. Subsequent DNA testing confirmed they belonged to the missing mountaineers, who were aged 39 and 41 at the time of their disappearance near the Weissmies peak. Many experts note an accelerated retreat of Switzerland’s glaciers, which have shrunk by a quarter over the decade leading to 2025, according to Glacier Monitoring Switzerland (Glamos). Police in Switzerland’s Valais region said in a statement that they had organised a betterment cognition pursuing the find of the 2 men's bodies and transferred them to a infirmary successful the canton's capital, Sion, for identification. The Weissmies summit, rising above 4,000 metres in the Saas Valley, is a popular climbing destination where the men were last seen. Regional officials maintain a database of missing persons dating back to 1925; the majority of entries involve individuals lost in the mountains, rivers or other bodies of water, police added. They also noted that this is not the first instance in which melting ice has revealed the remains of people who vanished several decades earlier. In 2023, human remains found on a glacier near the Matterhorn were identified as those of a German climber who had been missing since 1986. Global glacier loss has been accelerating since the 1990s, with a particularly sharp increase after 2000, the European Commission’s Copernicus programme reports. Glamos data show an additional 3 percent reduction in glacier area across 2025, following record ice loss in 2022 and 2023. Rising average temperatures have produced unseasonably warm conditions at high elevations and reduced snowfall, threatening some of the country’s ski resorts and events.