DNA testing has confirmed the identities of two Belgian mountaineers whose bodies emerged from a retreating glacier in southern Switzerland, 34 years after they vanished without a trace.
A hiker spotted the remains on the Trift Glacier on July 26 and reported the find to regional police in Wallis canton, the Swiss administrative region that borders Italy. The bodies were transported to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Wallis Hospital in Sion, where analysts built DNA profiles and matched them against records of the missing men.
Wallis police confirmed the results in a statement, closing a case that had been open for more than three decades. The two men, Belgian nationals aged 39 and 41 at the time, disappeared in the Weissmies region in 1992. No details about the original circumstances of their disappearance, or whether a search was conducted at the time, appeared in the police announcement.
CBS News reported that Wallis regional police issued the following statement:
"A direct comparison of DNA profiles has formally established that these are two mountaineers who went missing in the Weissmies region in 1992."
Police also acknowledged that this kind of discovery has become a recurring event. As Fox News noted, Valais police said glacial retreat is now routinely surfacing remains that had been locked in ice for decades.
The department's own missing-persons list stretches back to 1925 and focuses primarily on disappearances in the region's high mountains and rivers. The Trift Glacier sits near the Italian border in one of the most rugged stretches of the Swiss Alps, terrain that has claimed climbers for generations.
The Belgian climbers are far from the only long-missing individuals to reappear as ice recedes. The list of similar cases in recent years reads like a grim catalog of unfinished business across multiple mountain ranges and even the Antarctic.
In 2023, a body found near the Matterhorn was identified as a German climber who went missing in 1986. In July 2024, the remains of an American mountaineer turned up in Peru, 22 years after he disappeared while scaling a snowy peak. And in August 2025, a British researcher who vanished in Antarctica in 1959 was discovered near a receding glacier on King George Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. Around the same time, a man's body surfaced on a melting glacier in Pakistan, 28 years after he went missing.
Bones of a Swiss mountaineer who disappeared in 1994 were found on the Ober Gabelhorn glacier as well.
Go back further and the pattern holds. In 2017 alone, Italian mountain rescue crews recovered remains on the southern face of Mont Blanc believed to date from the 1980s or 1990s. That same year, remains in the Swiss Alps were identified as a British mountaineer missing since 1971. And a shrinking Swiss glacier revealed the frozen bodies of a couple who had vanished in 1942, three-quarters of a century earlier.
The police statement framed the phenomenon plainly:
"Due to the retreat of glaciers, the... remains of people who disappeared in the mountains several decades ago are repeatedly revealed."
That single sentence captures a reality that Swiss authorities now treat as routine rather than extraordinary. The forensic infrastructure is in place, the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Sion, the DNA databases, the century-old missing-persons registry. What has changed is how often the mountains give back what they took.
The names of the two Belgian climbers were not released publicly. Whether their families had long ago given up hope, or had been waiting for exactly this kind of confirmation, remains unknown. What is known is that the ice held them for 34 years, and that it no longer could.
Nature keeps its own schedule. Bureaucracies that lose track of people for decades could learn something from a glacier that eventually returns them.
