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| A mummified body photographed on March 5, 2015 is the body of a man discovered by Mexican alpinists on Pico de Orizaba, Mexico. Ice melting on the mountain caused by global warming exposed the mummy. ISRAEL ANGEL MIJANGOS — EPA/EFE |
CIUDAD SERDAN, MEXICO — As a result of warming temperatures, Mexico’s tallest volcano, Pico de Orizaba, is performing an all-natural striptease, the ice patches near its summit melting away to bare rock.
The same process is taking place in the permafrost of Russia, the ice fields of the Yukon and the glaciers of New Zealand. And as the once-frozen world emerges from slumber, it’s yielding relics, debris – and corpses – that have laid hidden for decades, even millennia.
The thaw has unnerved archaeologists, given hope to relatives of lost mountain climbers and solved the mysteries of old plane crashes.
What emerges is not always apparent – or even pleasant. That pungent smell? It’s a massive deposit of caribou dung in the Yukon that had been frozen for thousands of years, and now is decomposing in the air, its sharp odor unlocked.
Pico de Orizaba towers above all other mountains in Mexico at 18,491 feet. It is the highest peak in North America after Mount McKinley in Alaska and Mount Logan in Canada’s Yukon Territory. A challenging dormant volcano, Orizaba is a training ground for those interested in high-altitude climbing.
For a handful of climbers, it has been their last peak. They’ve been buried by avalanches or swallowed by crevasses. Now, the mountain is spitting back their bodies.
Late in February, a climbing party circled the jagged crater atop Orizaba.
“One of them slipped, and they later said he skidded down and came to a stop. When he got up, he saw a head poking out of the snow,” said Hilario Aguilar Aguilar, a veteran climber.
It was a mummified climber, a member of a Mexican expedition hit by an avalanche on Nov. 2, 1959. Some climbers fell near the Chimicheco Ridge, their bodies frozen in an icy time machine, only to re-emerge 56 years later.
Hearing of the macabre discovery, prosecutors dispatched Aguilar and other climbers March 4 to document the scene of death.
“Upon clearing away some snow so that I could take some photographs, I saw another hand. Suddenly, there were one, two, three hands. It didn’t seem possible. Digging a little more, we discovered that there was another body,” Aguilar said.
The natural fiber rope connecting the two bodies had disintegrated to little more than a stain in the ice, he added. Aguilar said one of the mummified climbers appeared to be wearing remnants of a red sweater.
“I tried to bring a piece as a sample, for evidence, but it turned to dust when I touched it,” he said, adding that the mummified bodies are unlikely to be retrieved from the mountain until weather clears, perhaps in November.
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