Discovery on the Trift Glacier
Nearly 34 years after they vanished, the bodies of two Belgian climbers have been found on the Trift Glacier in the Swiss Alps. A hiker discovered the remains on 26 July, according to police in the canton of Valais. The glacier is located in southern Switzerland, near the Italian border.
The remains were transported to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Wallis Hospital in Sion for identification. Through DNA analysis, officials formally confirmed that they were the two mountaineers who went missing in the Weissmies region in 1992. The men were 39 and 41 at the time of their disappearance.
Police stated that they organized a recovery operation after the discovery and transferred the bodies to the hospital in Sion, the canton's capital.
The 1992 Disappearance
On 4 September 1992, the two men set out from the Weissmies hut with the aim of climbing the Weissmies summit, which peaks at over 4,000 metres and is a popular mountaineering spot in the Saas Valley. They got as far as the Almagell hut. Caught out by appalling weather, they never reached their destination.
In the months that followed, several search operations were carried out, which led to the discovery of a rucksack, but not the hikers.
Climate Change and Glacier Melt
The discovery has been attributed to the accelerating melt of Swiss glaciers, a phenomenon widely linked to climate change. Switzerland's glaciers shrank by a quarter in the decade to 2025, according to Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos). Data from Glamos reported a further glacier reduction of 3% across 2025, following record years of ice loss in 2022 and 2023.
The rate of glacier shrinkage has been increasing globally since the 1990s, and at a particularly accelerated rate since 2000, according to the European Commission's monitoring body Copernicus. As climate change accelerates glacier melt, retreating ice has increasingly exposed the remains of climbers who disappeared years or even decades ago.
Previous Cases
This is not the first time that melting glaciers have revealed long-missing individuals. In 2023, human remains found on a glacier close to Switzerland's Matterhorn were confirmed to be those of a German climber who had been missing since 1986. Last year, the remains of a Swiss mountaineer who vanished in 1994 were discovered on a glacier on the Ober Gabelhorn mountain, also in Wallis.
Regional officials maintain a database of missing people dating back to 1925. The majority of people on it disappeared in the mountains, or in rivers and other bodies of water, police said.
The melting of glaciers has also exposed remains in other parts of the world. In August 2025, the remains of a British researcher who vanished in 1959 in Antarctica were discovered amid rocks near a receding glacier on King George Island. Around the same time, a missing man's body was discovered on a melting glacier in Pakistan, 28 years after he went missing. In July 2024, the body of an American mountaineer was found 22 years after he disappeared while scaling a snowy peak in Peru.
In 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. A few weeks later, the remains of a climber discovered in the Swiss Alps were identified as a British mountaineer who went missing in 1971. Also in 2017, a shrinking glacier in Switzerland revealed the bodies of a frozen couple who went missing in 1942.
The upward trend in global average temperatures has brought unseasonably warm weather to Switzerland's higher altitudes, and a reduction in snow has imperilled some of its ski resorts and competitions.