Alaska's melting glaciers are revealing long-lost frozen bodies

The lower end of Colony Glacier is convulsed into folds and ridges taller than houses. Strewn across this expanse of blue and white ice are rusted springs, nuts, bolts, tires, and the battered husk of a 28-cylinder propeller engine—the fragments of a plane that hasn’t flown for seven decades.

Workers have visited this crash site every summer since it was discovered 13 years ago, in the Chugach Mountains of southern Alaska. They are have been searching for the remains of 52 servicemen who disappeared when their C-124 Globemaster II military transport plane went down in 1952. And on a cold, clear afternoon last July, they finally found the remains of James Kimball—a crew member they feared they might never identify.

The discovery was fortuitous: Kinsea Ragland, a captain overseeing the search for Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations, was warming herself in a patch of sunlight when she noticed a dark mass frozen into an ice ridge 60 feet above. When she sent two of her team members scrambling up for a look, they found the shreds of a flight jacket and—still stuck to the ice—a right hand and forearm, only slightly withered and dried, severed below the elbow. 

Ragland had hoped that it might belong to Kimball. Out of the 52 servicemen who disappeared in the crash—remains from 49 had already been recovered—he “was going to be one of the toughest people to identify,” she says, because no DNA samples were available for him. 

Carlos Colon, a medicolegal death investigator with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, fell silent as he examined the cold hand. The fingers were curled inward, seemingly relaxed, and the thumb was gently tucked in. 

In situations like this, Colon often rehydrates a hand before trying to take fingerprints. “In this case, we didn’t have to,” he says. “It was in such good shape that I could see the friction ridges on the thumb and on the index finger.” He immediately photographed the prints, which were later sent to the FBI for analysis. If the hand belonged to Kimball, he would be the fiftieth service member from the crash to be identified.

The operation on Colony Glacier is one of a handful of efforts to find human remains that are emerging from glaciers around the world as the climate warms. 

The same military team also makes periodic visits to another site 140 miles to the northwest, on Eldridge Glacier, where the fragments—but so far no human remains—are emerging from another military plane, a C-119 Flying Boxcar that also crashed in 1952, with 19 servicemen onboard.

Across Alaska and neighboring parts of Canada, groups of volunteers, scientists, and in some cases military personnel are searching for half a dozen other large plane crashes they believe are still hidden in glacial ice.

But the total number of crashes concealed inside the region’s glaciers is probably much larger. “We’re talking about dozens of aircraft,” says Michael Rocereta, a retired geophysicist based in Homer, Alaska, who found the C-119 wreckage a few years ago, and is helping search for several other planes.

A similar storyline is unfolding across the Alps in Switzerland and Italy. “There are many mountaineers that are still missing in glaciers,” says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “At some point they will just be washed out or melt out.”

Statistics are hard to come by, but hundreds of people are thought to be missing across the Alps, including some soldiers from World War I who died near the Italian border. A few of these remains emerge each year during the summer melt—usually found by modern-day mountaineers. 

Although most are only a few decades old, several sets of much older remains have also turned up since the 1980s: the partly mummified skeleton of a young woman wearing shepherds’ clothing, who died around 1690 on Porchabella Glacier; the scattered bones of a traveling merchant, together with a sword, a pistol, and dozens of coins who died on Theodul Glacier around 1600; and of course the 5,200-year-old ice mummy, Ötzi, who emerged from a snowfield, with a copper ax, an unfinished longbow, and a quiver holding 14 arrows. 

As climate change takes hold in this region, the tempo of these discoveries could increase. “Just in the last 10 years, we’ve lost about one quarter of the ice volume in Switzerland,” says Huss.

On Alaska’s Colony Glacier, the team looking for the final two passengers hoped that the glacier’s thinning ice would finally reveal their remains. Their search had become a race against time—a competition between climate-driven melt and the inherent movement of the glacier. Even as Colony Glacier thins, it continues to slide forward—dumping its contents into a vast lake—raising the possibility that if remains weren’t found, they could be lost forever on the lake bottom.

Finding MATS 1107

On November 22, 1952, the C-124 Globemaster II was making its way from McChord Air Force Base near Seattle to Elmendorf Base near Anchorage, Alaska. Some of the 52 passengers and crew on board were headed to new postings in Alaska; others, to deployments in the Korean War.

At 7:53pm, the crew made their final radio contact, using the call sign MATS 1107. As the plane flew in darkness, high winds gradually pushed it north of its intended route—cutting it off from crucial radio beacons that would have prompted the crew to correct course. The plane was cruising at full speed as it slammed into the side of 9,629-foot Mount Gannet, at about 8:15pm, just 50 miles short of its destination. 

The 175,000-pound aircraft probably disintegrated within three tenths of a second, according to Rocereta, triggering an avalanche that swept the fragments 1,000 feet down the steep slope—scattering them on the upper reaches of Colony Glacier.

A search plane spotted the wreckage several days later; but storms soon buried it beneath fresh snow. The wreckage was lost, and the search was called off.

In the years since the crash, as much as 300 feet of snow settled over the wreckage, slowly compressing into ice. The oozing flow of the glacier carried the wreck downstream, several hundred feet per year.

Sometime in the 1980s—as children of the lost airmen were raising children of their own—the deeply buried wreck would have passed through the Colony Ice Fall, where the brittle glacier skids 3,000 feet down a steep chute, causing it to crack into blocks the size of apartment buildings. This slow-grinding upheaval tumbled and mixed the fragments of lost aircraft and lost lives.

The wreckage remained hidden during this journey. But as it descended to lower, warmer elevations, the ice that covered it began to melt, losing a few feet of thickness each summer—bringing the buried wreck back toward the surface.

(Learn more about the race to save the climate data found in Arctic ice—before it melts.)

Piecing together the past with a ring and a photograph

In 2012, an Alaska Army National Guard Blackhawk helicopter flying over the lower end of the glacier spotted the shredded remains of a yellow life raft, and a landing gear tire that seemed to have come from a large plane. When soldiers landed three days later, they found a large swath of ice dotted with twisted metal pieces, including ID cards and metal dog tags from several crew members–identifying it as MATS 1107, the lost C-124 Globemaster II. The glacier had carried it 12 miles from its crash site.

By 2013, the U.S. military was sending a team each summer to collect remains as they melted out of the glacier: wallets, watches, rings, bones, and an occasional mummified hand or foot. The remains were sampled for DNA, then sent in flag-draped caskets to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for eventual burial.

The people taking part in these search missions often studied the lives of the passengers they were looking for, says Colon: “You feel like you know these people.” 

And the melting glacier revealed their lives piece by piece. By 2024, the team had identified remains from 48 of the 52 people on plane. Later that summer, they found a mummified hand bearing a class ring from Fordyce High School in Arkansas. The ring and DNA identified them as belonging to Airman Bernis White, who was 20 at the time, moving to a new position at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage.

A year later, in June 2025, the melting ice released White’s wallet, containing his ID card and a miraculously preserved photograph: a young woman in sepia tones, smiling, with curly amber hair beneath a high-school graduation cap. A note handwritten in the lower-right corner read, “Love, Dorothy.”

The discovery of White brought the number of identified souls to 49. And the recovery of Kimball’s hand, this past July 23, brought the fiftieth identification.

Wreckage emerging in ice melt

The effects of warming in Alaska are more subtle than in the Alps, but still significant. Alaska’s glaciers have so far lost only a small fraction of their volume because they were so big to begin with. But they are losing 15 cubic miles of ice per year—about 30 times the amount disappearing from the Alps.

“The thinning rates are increasing,” says Eran Hood, a glacial hydrologist at the University of Alaska Southeast. In the lower, warmer elevations of Alaska, 10 to 30 feet of ice now melt off the glaciers each summer.

With that accelerated melt, the wreckage “is coming out tens of years faster than it would have,” says Louis Sass, III, a glaciologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Alaska Science Center in Anchorage.

(The world's glaciers are melting faster than we thought—learn more.)

At the C-124 Globemaster II crash site, that change could have made a difference. The bottom end of Colony Glacier slides forward about 500 feet per year, splintering into icebergs that drift away and melt on a sprawling lake. Swaths of ice that contain wreckage are already entering that dangerous splinter zone where searchers can’t venture—and whatever that ice holds will eventually end up on the lake floor, lost forever.

For this reason, the search at Colony Glacier has become a race against time. Every bit of extra melting from the warming climate has probably permitted workers to recover more human remains, says Hood—“before they get dumped into the lake.”

It could be part of the reason why Airman Third Class Kimball finally turned up when he did.

How the final bodies were identified

Kimball, a steward who had looked after the safety of passengers on the doomed plane, had grown up in Taos, New Mexico, on the edge of an arid, sagebrush-dotted valley where the Rio Grande flowed through a narrow gorge. He was adopted. And at age 21, he had no wife or children, so there were no samples from blood relatives that would allow him to be identified through DNA.

The team knew they might well find fragments of Kimball’s bones on the glacier, but without an identifiable body part remarkably preserved, they would never know it was him.

Now, the frozen hand provided an unexpected clue.

Colon’s hands trembled as he photographed it. After he, Ragland, and their fellow searchers retired to their hotel rooms that July evening in Anchorage, Colon received a call: the FBI confirmed that the fingerprints were Kimball’s. “It was actually pretty exciting,” he says—and a bit emotional. “That night I just couldn’t go to sleep.” 

In the months since that July 2025 visit to Colony Glacier, the hundreds of new bone fragments that were found have undergone DNA testing, so each piece can be assigned to the correct person. That testing revealed some other big surprises. It showed that some of the newly found fragments belong to the final two servicemen who hadn’t been identified—Captain Jerome Goebel and Airman Second Class Dan McMann. All 52 service members were finally accounted for.

The Air Force announced that milestone on January 7. Reaching it was “the privilege of a lifetime,” says Ragland, who admits, “we didn’t think we were going to find them all,” because conditions on the glacier were so difficult. 

The recent DNA tests also showed that some of the remains collected as far back as 2015 actually belonged to Kimball; their DNA matched the newly discovered hand. 

Finding Kimball’s hand and identifying his fingerprints were strokes of luck, which depended on factors beyond the control of any search team. Glacial melt unfolds in a chaotic and unpredictable manner.

A single hot summer can suddenly bring an object that was buried under 20 feet of ice to the surface. By pure chance, the object can even end up sitting in plain sight, atop a frozen pedestal. That’s how Kimball’s hand emerged, and it still amazes Ragland.

“The glacier decides to return what she wants to return, when she wants to return it,” she says. “It was time for us to find Kimball.”