Remains of a Lost Antarctic Researcher Are Finally Recovered, 66 Years After He Fell Into a Crevasse
A team of Polish scientists found bone fragments and items belonging to Dennis “Tink” Bell near Ecology Glacier on Antarctica’s King George Island
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In July 1959, Dennis “Tink” Bell set off from an Antarctic research station with another scientist, planning to survey the ice plateau above the nearby Ecology Glacier. The pair safely crossed a field of deep, wedge-shaped crevasses, but after that, Bell walked ahead of his dogsled to encourage the tired dogs to keep moving in the deep snow, leaving his skis behind. Suddenly, he was gone, having fallen roughly 100 feet into a hidden crevasse.
His partner, surveyor Jeff Stokes, heard Bell calling and sent down a rope. Bell tied the rope to his belt, and Stokes began pulling him up with the help of his dogs. Stokes had almost successfully extracted Bell from the crevasse before tragedy struck again. Bell’s belt snapped, and he disappeared back into the ice. Calling down, Stokes no longer heard any response, and he returned to his base amid worsening winter conditions. Even though researchers went back to the site to look for Bell, his body was never recovered.
“There was no conclusion. There was no service; there was no anything. Just Dennis gone,” his brother, David Bell, tells the BBC’s Georgina Rannard.
Need to know: What is a crevasse?
As a glacier moves, the brittle ice at its surface can split in steep and thin cracks called crevasses. These can be up to nearly 150 feet deep. Sometimes, a crevasse is covered by snow, hiding the drop-off below and posing a danger to anyone walking near it.
Now, 66 years after Bell disappeared into the ice, his family is finally getting the closure they’ve waited more than half a century for. In January this year, a Polish research team discovered bone fragments and upwards of 200 personal items at the edge of the receding glacier, according to a statement from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). DNA analysis of the remains confirmed a match for Bell.
Bell was just 25 when he disappeared, and his brother says in the BAS statement that he’d always been adventurous and mechanically minded. “Dennis was the oldest of three siblings and was my hero as he seemed to be able to turn his hand to anything, servicing petrol engines, photography, including processing his own films,” David says. “He built a radio from scratch, spending hours taking down Morse code.”
In Antarctica, Bell worked as a meteorologist for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, a predecessor to BAS. His job was to launch weather balloons and send the data back to the United Kingdom via radio, around the clock. He also assisted in surveying King George Island, which at that time was mostly unmapped and unexplored. At the Admiralty Bay station, which housed about six men, Bell was known as the best cook and handled the food store over the Antarctic winter, when sea ice meant no new supplies could be brought in, per the BBC.
Russel Thomson, a fellow researcher who was stationed at Admiralty Bay with Bell during the expedition, remembers his fondness for practical jokes and says in the BAS statement that Bell had a “tremendous, tremendous character.”
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Despite the warmth of camaraderie among the scientists, Antarctica was—and still is—a dangerous place to work. Ieuan Hopkins, an archivist at BAS, tells New Scientist’s Matthew Sparkes that working in the region in the 1950s and ’60s was perilous, and deaths were a regular occurrence. “There was an average of 1 percent chance that you wouldn’t come back,” Hopkins tells New Scientist. “It’s a really extreme environment. It’s a really dangerous environment. We would lose people.”
Bell’s brother, David, is now 86 years old and lives in Australia. To help with the genetic testing of the remains, he and his sister, Valerie Kelly, contributed DNA samples. Forensic geneticist Denise Syndercombe Court of King’s College London ran the test, which confirmed beyond a doubt that the recovered remains were those of Bell.
Now, David plans to return to the U.K. to finally lay his brother to rest, according to the BBC.
“It’s wonderful; I’m going to meet my brother,” David tells the BBC. “You might say we shouldn’t be thrilled, but we are. He’s been found—he’s come home now.”