As climate change continues to affect ecosystems around the world, it’s leading to record-low water levels and melting glaciers. Scientists expected many of these changes, but they may not have expected some of the discoveries.
As these climate changes impact communities in the U.S. and abroad, human remains are popping up on beaches and glaciers.
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Human remains discovered at Lake Mead
Lake Mead hit a record-low water level earlier this month, as Straight Arrow previously reported. As of Aug. 6, the lake contained the least amount of water since it was filled in the 1930s. Experts say the lake and the Colorado River Basin need the El Niño system projected to reach the U.S. this winter to deliver enough moisture for meaningful recovery.
Given current low water levels, authorities are receiving reports of new discoveries on the lake’s beaches — including human remains.
On Sunday, the Lake Mead Interagency Communications Center received a report of potential human remains at Boulder Beach. Turns out, a woman, her friend and his daughter were at the beach playing with rocks when the man grabbed what looked like a human jaw.
“When he looked, he saw the teeth and everything,” the woman told Las Vegas news outlet KLAS.
And this wasn’t the first time bodies have appeared at the lake. In 2022, when water levels dipped, boaters spotted a metal barrel containing human remains. Officials believe those remains were from the 1980s.
There were also three other instances that same year where human remains were found at the same place as Sunday’s remains — Boulder Beach.
Later in 2022, officials found two drowning victims in or around Lake Mead. Earlier this year, NewsNation spoke with an ex-mobster who said the mafia may have used Lake Mead as a dumping ground for bodies. So if climate change continues to cause low lake levels, some bodies quite literally tied to the mafia may start popping up.
Officials found bodies in the Swiss Alps, too
And the bodies aren’t just in Lake Mead — or even the U.S. for that matter. On Wednesday, Wallis police in the Swiss Alps reported that two Belgian climbers who went missing 34 years ago were found. Their bodies were freed from a melting glacier.
A hiker found the bodies on July 26 in Switzerland, near the Italian border. They were taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Wallis Hospital. There, officials conducted a DNA comparison and confirmed they were the missing hikers.
“Due to the retreat of glaciers, the … remains of people who disappeared in the mountains several decades ago are repeatedly revealed,” police said.
Like Lake Mead, this wasn’t a first.
In 2025, a British researcher’s remains were found amid rocks near a receding glacier in Antarctica. He’d been missing since 1959. That same year, a Swiss mountaineer who disappeared in 1994 was found on a glacier, also in the Swiss Alps.
In the past few years alone, receding glaciers also led to the recovery of bodies that went missing in 1942 and 1971.
And this likely isn’t the end. According to Climate Central, “human-caused climate change is causing glaciers to melt at an alarming rate,” and 7 of the past 10 years saw the most significant glacier loss in history.
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