In August 2025, the body of an unidentified man was found in a melting glacier in the remote Kohistan region of Pakistan. It was found by a local shepherd who told the BBC, “What I saw was unbelievable. The body was intact. The clothes were not even torn.”
An ID card, found tucked inside the man’s clothing, helped authorities to piece together his story. His name was Naseeruddin, and in June 1997, he had been travelling through the region with his brother. The men were high up in the mountains when Naseeruddin walked into cave and then disappeared, seemingly into thin air. Organised searches drew a blank, and as the years ticked by, the mystery remained unsolved.
With the body’s discovery, things became clear. Naseeruddin died when he fell into the crevasse of a glacier, deep inside the cave. Freezing temperatures prevented decomposition, and over time, his body became mummified. It moved too.
Glaciers aren’t static. Gravity causes them to flow slowly downhill, like a giant river of ice. The speed of this movement varies. It can be fast (up to 30 metres per day) or it can be slow (around 50 centimetres per year), but the average glacier moves at a rate of around 25 centimetres per day.
Anything trapped inside the glacier, such as rocks or dead bodies, moves downhill with it, and is eventually ‘spat out’ at the lower end or snout of the glacier. In this area, known as the ablation zone, ice melts more quickly than it accumulates. And as it melts, anything trapped inside it is released. In Naseeruddin’s case, it took 28 years for his body to emerge from the bowels of the glacier back into the open.
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Other bodies have spent much longer inside the glaciers that entombed them. Most notably, Őtzi the Iceman, the 45-year-old man who died from a violent arrow wound and became trapped inside a glacier 5,300 years ago. His exquisitely preserved remains were discovered in the Őtzal Alps on the Italian-Austrian border in 1991. He is Europe’s oldest known natural human mummy.
Now, as climate change intensifies, glaciers are melting more rapidly and many are moving more quickly. The transit time for items trapped inside them depends on various factors, including location, ice thickness and surface gradient, but the potential for items to emerge more rapidly than they would have done historically is there.
Now, a growing number of bodies of climbers, skiers and hikers who died many years ago in icy, mountainous regions are being found. This includes the remains of those who became buried in relatively shallow layers of ice and snow, and the bodies of those, such as Naseeruddin and Őtzi, that became trapped inside a glacier and had to wait for it to move – literally at ‘glacial speed’ – before they saw the light of day again.
