As Matterhorn Glaciers Melt, Bodies of Japanese Climbers Lost 45 Years Ago Are Revealed
One night in August 1970, two young Japanese climbers set up a tent in the Swiss Alps. They wanted to rest up for the next day’s ascent up the Matterhorn glacier, a storied mountain climbing 14,692 feet in elevation, when a sudden snowstorm took them by surprise, police told Reuters. The climbers vanished and, for decades it seems, were entombed in ice.
“It does still happen, especially in cases of avalanches,” Ed Crothers from the American Institute of Avalanche Research and Education told Agence France-Presse. Authorities said Thursday they identified the remains last month of 21-year-old Masayuki Kobayashi and 22-year-old Michio Oikawa who had been found on the glacier. Over the years, bones belonging to humans have turned up, experts say, as rising temperatures melt their frozen tombs.
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Modern hikers and climbers, however, typically vanish by falling into crevasses in the mountains — “a deep freezer,” Hafner said. The remains are transported by glaciers over time and resurface during the movement. However, archaeologist Martin Callanan said the emergence of modern remains is still “a sign that things are changing.” Without global warming, he said, some remains would still melt out — but others would not.
“They get encapsulated in ice and you won’t find them until it melts,” he said. The phenomenon has become so common that glacial archaeologists have emerged to study it. “It’s a new and emerging sub-discipline,” Callanan said, “a sign of the times.”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/07/matterhorn-glacier-reveals-remains-from-long-lost-japanese-climbers-missing-45-years/
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