An 86-year-old mountaineer has been reunited with his backpack and climbing equipment after the kit emerged from a melting glacier in Austria – more than 60 years after he was forced to leave them there.

Items including an ice axe, camera and a pipe dating from the 1950s or 1960s were discovered on the Sulztalferner glacier in Austria’s Tyrol region, at an altitude of 2,955 metres (9,700ft) above sea level, by a hiker in July.

Austrian police began an investigation and through heavily frayed documents found in the backpack discovered the owner’s name and tracked him down.

The man had fallen into the crevasse while crossing the glacier with friends in August 1963. The group was held together by a rope, so his friends were able to pull him free. Police said to reduce his weight he had removed his backpack and thrown it into the crevasse.

They did not publicly name the man but said he was too ill to collect the items. They were returned to him via his son.

The accelerating retreat of European glaciers, which scientists say is primarily driven by human-caused global heating, has revealed a vast array of relics, ancient ecosystems and human remains in recent decades.

In 2015 a barracks where Italian troops had sheltered while fighting the Austro-Hungarian army during the White war – a battle waged across Alpine terrain during the first world war – was discovered on Mount Scorluzzo, a peak overlooking the Stelvio pass. The bodies of dozens of soldiers, some still in their uniforms, have emerged from the melting ice within the past 20 years.

The most extraordinary discovery of human remains on a melting glacier was made in 1991, when two German hikers found the 5,300-year-old mummified body of a hunter in the Ötztal Alps, close to Italy’s border with Austria. The body of “Ötzi the Iceman”, replete with tattoos, is on display at a museum in Bolzano.