The remains of an Antarctic researcher have been discovered by a Polish team among rocks exposed by a receding glacier in Antarctica. They are identified by DNA as those of Dennis ‘Tink’ Bell, a 25 year-old meteorologist who was working for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS), the predecessor of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). He died in a crevasse on a glacier at Admiralty Bay on King George Island, situated off the Antarctic Peninsula on 26 July 1959. His body was never recovered.
Over 200 personal items have been found, including the remains of radio equipment, a flashlight, ski poles, an inscribed Erguel wristwatch, a Swedish Mora knife, ski poles and an ebonite pipe stem.
The remains were carried to the Falkland Islands on the BAS Royal Research Ship Sir David Attenborough and handed into the care of His Majesty’s Coroner for British Antarctic Territory, Malcolm Simmons, who accompanied them on the journey from Stanley to London, supported by the Royal Air Force.
The human remains were sent for DNA testing by Denise Syndercombe Court, Professor in Forensic Genetics at King’s College London. She has now confirmed there is a match with samples from his brother David Bell and his sister Valerie Kelly. They are ‘more than one billion times’ more likely to be related than not.