Has science solved one of history’s greatest adventure mysteries?
Has science solved one of history’s greatest adventure mysteries?
A six-decade-old adventure mystery that has prompted conspiracy theories around Soviet military experiments, Yetis, and even extraterrestrial contact may have its best, most sensible explanation yet in a series of avalanche simulations based in part on car crash experiments and animation used in the movie Frozen.
In 2021, a pair of Swiss researchers first presented data pointing to the likelihood that a bizarrely small, delayed avalanche may have been responsible for the gruesome injuries and deaths of nine experienced hikers who never returned from a planned 200-mile adventure in Russia’s Ural Mountains in the winter of 1959. Three subsequent expeditions have since confirmed their assumptions about the deadly—and infamous—event.
Dyatlov Pass incident, ten members of the Soviet Union’s Urals Polytechnic Institute in Yekaterinburg—nine students and one sports instructor who fought in World War II—headed into the frigid wilderness on a skiing and mountaineering expedition on January 23, 1959.
One student with joint pain turned back, but the rest, led by 23-year-old engineering student Igor Dyatlov, continued on. According to camera film and personal diaries later found on the scene by investigators, the team made camp on February 1, pitching a large tent on the snowy slopes of Kholat Saykhl, whose name can be interpreted as “Dead Mountain” in the language of the region’s Indigenous Mansi people.
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