The bodies of two Belgian mountaineers who vanished in the Swiss Alps in 1992 have been discovered after being exposed by a melting glacier.

A hiker found the remains on 26 July on the Trift Glacier, located south of the Swiss city of Lucerne, according to regional officials.

Subsequent DNA testing confirmed the bodies belonged to the two men who disappeared 34 years ago in the vicinity of the Weissmies mountain. They were aged 39 and 41 when they went missing on the peak, a popular mountaineering spot in the Saas Valley that rises to an elevation of more than 4,000 metres.

Following the discovery, police in Switzerland's Valais region launched an operation to recover the remains. The force transferred them to a hospital in Sion, the capital of the canton, where teams carried out the formal identification process.

Officials in the region have long kept track of such disappearances. Regional authorities maintain a missing persons database dating back to 1925, with police noting that the vast majority of people on the register vanished either in the high mountains or in rivers and other waterways.

Police also pointed out that this discovery is part of an ongoing pattern in the Alps. It is not the first time melting ice has revealed people who disappeared decades ago; in 2023, human remains uncovered on a glacier near the Matterhorn were confirmed to be those of a German climber missing since 1986.

The primary driver behind these discoveries is the rapid pace of ice loss across the alpine landscape. Data from Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland, known as Glamos, indicates that the country's glaciers shrank by a quarter in the single decade leading up to 2025.

That melting trend has shown little sign of slowing down. Glamos reported a further 3% reduction in Swiss glaciers across 2025, following on from record-breaking years of ice loss in both 2022 and 2023.

The issue extends well beyond Switzerland, though the effect here is especially sharp. The European Commission's Copernicus monitoring service reports that the rate of glacier shrinkage has grown worldwide since the 1990s, accelerating sharply after the year 2000. Many scientists attribute the rapid retreat of Swiss glaciers directly to climate change.

This upward trend in global temperatures has brought unseasonably warm weather to Switzerland's highest altitudes. The resulting reduction in snow has had a direct impact on the ground, imperilling winter sports competitions and putting several alpine ski resorts at risk.

What the authorities have not released to the public are the names of the two Belgian climbers. With ice continuing to recede across the Alps, regional authorities are likely to face similar recoveries in the seasons ahead. I'll be following this one — check back for updates.