‘Frozen’ CG snow and crash-tested corpses offer clues to mysterious 60-year-old Russian dead – Heaven32

The Dyatlov Pass incident is the mother of all unresolved cases: nine people were found dead in 1959, deep in the Urals, in circumstances that no one has been able to explain satisfactorily. But new research is using simulation techniques from multiple eras to advance what is perhaps the least implausible story of this tragic mystery.

The article, published yesterday in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, came with a very readable summary in National Geographic, which is well worth your time. (Even though the title is the dreaded “Did Science Solve …?”)

Basically the mystery is this: The eight students and their ski instructor had pitched their tent on a slope that seemed safe, if not perfectly fine, so given the surroundings of Kholat Syakhl

, or “Dead Mountain,” but were later found scattered throughout the region in various stages of stripping and destruction. The carnage seemed beyond what an avalanche would produce, and there seemed no evidence or likelihood of such carnage at first.

For more than 60 years, this was a source of speculation and conspiracy, especially since a cover-up emerged by the Soviet government at the time. Even Russia, which revisited the event in 2019, failed to appear to produce a convincing explanation.

Enter Alexander Puzrin and Johan Gaume, from ETH Switzerland Zurich and EPFL, respectively, two highly prestigious and advanced technical institutes. Curious about the incident for their own reasons, they began to figure out how to resolve what had happened once and for all. An interesting personal detail:

The scientific investigation came with the added benefit of Puzrin’s wife, who is Russian. “When I told him that I was working on the Dyatlov mystery, for the first time, he looked at me with real respect,” he says.

You don’t know what to say!

In any case, the researchers developed a new hypothesis based on certain ideas.

First, the slope was not as shallow as it looked, it was close to the minimum for an avalanche to occur and the snow was characterized by a base layer suitable for gliding on top. The icy winds could have added mass and caused a slide under the hole in which the group had pitched their tent.

Second, Gaume visited the creators of the movie “Frozen”, which featured a very realistic snow simulation. He met with Disney’s snow simulator and got permission to use and change the code, but in this case, to see what an avalanche would do to sleeping students. Their simulations showed that it wouldn’t take much, a chunk of frozen snow the size of a large car, to cause the devastation the rescue team witnessed.

Third, they used GM’s investigations that broke the ribs of hundreds of corpses in an attempt to adjust seat belts. They proposed that, because Russian students would have slept on their skis, it was quite similar to the reaction of some corpses with rigid mounts to impact. Hence the horrific injuries rather than the usual suffocation that occurs from being submerged in a drift that often happens to avalanche victims.

All this remains speculation as much as speculation, but the important thing is that by combining these different reasonably objective measures, Puzrin and Gaume show that an avalanche may have been responsible for the incident at the Dyatlov Pass, as rare whatever the combination of circumstances. State.

They freely admit that many might not accept this explanation – “It’s too normal,” Gaume said – and will continue to pursue the conspiracies and fantastical scenarios that the incident has spawned for half a century. But for others, it may offer some solace: a reason to believe that these poor nine souls were in the wrong place at the wrong time.