Glacier Melt Yields World War I Corpses
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
ROME – The mummified bodies of a small group of Austrian soldiers killed in World War I have emerged remarkably intact from a thawing glacier that has preserved them for almost 90 years.
Maurizio Vicenzi, an alpine rescue volunteer, stumbled upon the soldiers, still dressed in their tattered uniforms, about 11,000 feet up on the dei Forni glacier near the Swiss and Austrian borders in the Italian Alps on Friday.
It is thought they died in the battle of Punta San Matteo, fought above 9,800 feet and along a 31-mile front in the Ortles-Cevedale group of glaciers. It is said to be the highest-altitude battle in history.
Local reports differed as to whether there were three or four bodies, but seemed to agree that the remains were tangled in such a way as to suggest that the men may have died or been buried together.
Before their remains were able be removed – attempts to send a recovery team in by helicopter had to be postponed until yesterday due to high winds – Mr. Vicenzi used a camera to record the extraordinary spectacle he had found.
After walking for hours alone looking for memorabilia of World War I, Mr. Vicenzi, who runs a small museum featuring finds relinquished by thawing glaciers, spotted a “dark stain” 75-feet away, down a precipitous wall of ice.
“It looked like a rock,” he later said.
But when he looked through his binoculars, he instead made out a dark, mummified hand, protruding from clothing in rags.
He said that the soldiers had almost certainly died on September 3, 1918, in one of the many battles fought at dizzying heights along the Italian-Austrian front between 1915-18.
The discovery is thought to be the first of mummified remains of soldiers ever to come to light from World War I.
Glacial thawing in the same area of northeastern Italy, blamed on global warming, revealed several years ago a skeleton of a soldier and remnants of the so-called “city of ice” which Austro-Hungarian troops built inside it during World War I, including indications of bunkers, barracks, cells, corridors, and storage areas.
Similar thawing in the Similaun glacier, in the same Trentino Alto Adige region as Friday’s discovery was made, led to the discovery in 1991 of Otzi, a hunter who had lived some 5,300 years ago.
