Temperatures are also reaching record highs in the Swiss Alps. Glaciers are melting there, exposing a landscape that was previously invisible. Hikers have already found two bodies and a plane that crashed in 1968. The bodies have yet to be identified, but one of the two who died may be billionaire Karl-Erivan Haub, who ran a supermarket chain and disappeared in the region four years ago.
Last Wednesday, two French mountaineers found human remains while climbing the Chessjen Glacier in the canton of Valais. A helicopter carried the remains away. The skeleton was somewhere near an old path that has been out of use for ten years. The two hikers probably still had an old map and ended up there. The body is said to be that of someone who “died sometime in the 70s or 80s”.
A week earlier, another body was also found on the Stockji glacier near the Zermatt resort. In both cases, DNA testing must identify the bodies. That would take a few more days, according to the police.
The police do have a list of about three hundred people who went missing since 1925. Among them were Karl-Erivan Haub, a German-Russian-American billionaire, who was boss of supermarket chain Tengelmann. He disappeared near Zermatt during ski training on April 7, 2018. In 2021, he was officially pronounced dead. According to German media, he is the person who was found near the Stockji Glacier. One of the two hikers who found the body, though, claims they found clothes in neon colors “in the style of the 80s”.
During the first week of August, a mountain guide also spotted the wreckage of a plane, a Piper Cherokke, that had crashed over the Aletsch Glacier on June 30, 1968. On board were three people from Zurich: a teacher, a doctor and his son. Their bodies were recovered at the time, but the plane was not.
The Swiss Alps had a winter with relatively little snow and already had two heat waves this summer. Last month, authorities advised mountaineers against climbing the Matterhorn due to the unusually high temperatures. These rose to almost 30 degrees Celsius in Zermatt. During the heat wave in July, a record high was recorded at which the water begins to freeze. That ‘freezing point’ was at 5,184 meters, while it is normally at about 3,000 to 3,500 meters in the summer.
Free unlimited access to Showbytes? Which can!
Log in or create an account and don’t miss out on any of the stars.