Nearly seven decades after a British researcher plummeted to his death in a glacial crevasse off Antarctica, his remains have been identified and returned to his family, the British Antarctic Survey announced on Monday.
The researcher, Dennis Bell, was 25 years old on July 26, 1959, when he fell into a chasm on King George Island, which is part of the South Shetland Islands and is about 75 miles north of Antarctica.
Mr. Bell, who grew up in northwest London and was known as Tink, had been working as a meteorologist for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, the predecessor of the BAS, which oversees most of Britain’s research in Antarctica.
Blizzard-like conditions foiled a desperate attempt to rescue him by several other members of the expedition that he was on, according to the organization.
This January, while combing through some loose rocks on the island at the front of the Ecology Glacier, which had receded, a research team from Poland discovered human remains that scientists later said matched samples taken from Mr. Bell’s brother, David Bell, and sister, Valerie Kelly.
“When my sister Valerie and I were notified that our brother, Dennis, had been found after 66 years, we were shocked and amazed,” David Bell, who lives in Australia, said in a statement provided by the BAS.
The researchers also found more than 200 personal items that the BAS said had belonged to Mr. Bell, including an inscribed Erguel wristwatch, a flashlight, ski poles, a knife, a pipe stem and the remnants of radio equipment.
The eldest of three siblings, Mr. Bell served in the Royal Air Force and had trained as a radio operator before joining the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in 1958, according to his biography.
On July 26, 1959, which was wintertime in the Southern Hemisphere, he and three other researchers left the base at Admiralty Bay Station for an ice plateau to carry out survey and geological work.
The group was climbing the glacier when the dogs that were towing their sleds became fatigued. Mr. Bell was trudging ahead of the sleds, and the snow and ice gave way under him, spawning a frantic effort to save him that was chronicled in the book “Of Ice and Men,” which was written by Vivian Fuchs, a former director of the BAS.
Mr. Bell was trapped in the crevasse and responded when Jeff Stokes, a surveyor who was part of the group, yelled down to him.
“Peering into the depths, Stokes called repeatedly and was greatly relieved to be answered,” the book says. “Lowering a rope almost a hundred feet, he told Bell to tie himself on.”
But instead of tying the rope to his body, Mr. Bell tied it to his belt, which broke during the rescue attempt. He no longer responded to Mr. Stokes’s calls, and the weather began to deteriorate rapidly. The men left markers in the area, but Mr. Bell was gone.
After his remains were discovered in January, they were taken to the Falkland Islands on the BAS Royal Research Ship Sir David Attenborough and then to London, the BAS said. They were sent for DNA testing to a forensic genetics professor at King’s College London, who determined that the remains were “more than one billion times” more likely to be related than not to Mr. Bell’s brother and sister.
Professor Jane Francis, the director of the BAS, said in statement on Monday that Mr. Bell was one of the many brave researchers who had “contributed to the early science and exploration of Antarctica under extraordinarily harsh conditions.”
“This discovery,” she said, “brings closure to a decades-long mystery and reminds us of the human stories embedded in the history of Antarctic science.”