Scientists say the retreat of the ice is an unexpected boon for those yearning to peer back in time.

“It looks like the warming trend seen in many regions is continuing,” said Gerald Holdsworth, a glaciologist at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta. “There are still some large snowbanks left in promising places, and many glaciers of all different shapes, orientations and sizes, so the finds could go on for a long time yet.”

Some discoveries are personal, allowing families closure after years of mourning loved ones who appeared to have vanished. Others have added alluring clues into the history of human migration, diet, health and ethnic origins, said María Victoria Monsalve, a pathologist at the University of British Columbia who studies ice mummies.

She said some of the most valuable discoveries in recent years include three Inca child mummies found on the summit of Mount Llullaillaco in northern Argentina and a 550-year-old iceman discovered by sheep hunters in northern British Columbia.

Younger mummies can also add to the historical record. In 2004, three well-preserved soldiers were found in a scene of high-altitude fighting from World War I in the Italian Alps. And in 2006, a military lab in Hawaii pieced together the story of a World War II airman found on Darwin Glacier in California. Identified as Leo M. Mustonen, he was buried in his hometown, Brainerd, Minn.

Even Mr. Holdsworth, who as a glaciologist is generally more interested in the ice itself, has been closely monitoring the Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska, in part because he says he believes that it holds a plane that crashed near the Yukon border in 1951.

For the family of Rafael Pabón, the pilot found high in the Andes in November, the discovery was a relief of sorts. For two decades, his mother, Yolanda Galindo de Pabón, 69, had been tortured by thoughts of what had happened to him. She said she nurtured a theory that he might be wandering Bolivia’s provinces as a result of an accident. She wondered whether his plane could have been hijacked and flown across the border into Brazil.