Glaciers melting due to global warming are exposing the bodies of missing mountain climbers buried and preserved in ice over the years.
A shepherd recently stumbled on remains in the Lady Valley of Pakistan’s remote and mountainous Kohistan region. An ID card found with the mummified body identified it as Naseeruddin, who disappeared in June 1997 after falling into a glacier crack during a snowstorm, the BBC reported.
Police confirmed the identity of the body and his brother, Kathiruddin, told the BBC that he was with Naseeruddin when the latter went missing after stepping into a cave.
Kathiruddin asked for help in finding his brother, but he was never found.
Prof. Muhammad Bilal, head of the Department of Environment at Comsats University Islamabad, said the extreme cold froze the body, preventing its decomposition.
While Naseeruddin was still dead after his body was defrosted, the opposite happened to one of three frozen embryos belonging to American Linda Archerd of Oregon that had been stored in a fertility clinic.
The embryos were adopted by childless Ohio couple Linda and Tim Pierce, who they used to get Linda pregnant.
Of the three embryos the Pierces received from Archerd, one didn’t make the thaw and two were transferred to Lindsey’s womb, but only one was successfully implanted, CBS News reports.
Last week, the implanted embryo was born as a baby boy to the Pierces. More than successfully having a child for the Pierces and Archerd, not having to discard her embryos against her Christian belief, the transfer of the nearly 31-year-old embryo marked the longest frozen embryo to result in a live birth, according to Dr. John David Gordon, CBS News reports.
Archerd’s embryos were harvested in 1994 but she never got to implant them to bear other children, as she and her husband divorced after the birth of their only child. The length of storage from that year until the Pierces adopted the embryo was 11,148 days.
Gordon’s clinic assisted in the previous record, when twins Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway were born in Portland on 31 October 2022 from embryos frozen for 30 years, or 10,905 days, CBS News and KUTV reported.