In February 1959, nine Russian students were killed in northern Siberia, in the Ural Mountains, in the former USSR.
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Sixty-two years ago, in the middle of winter 1959, nine hikers were found dead under strange circumstances in the Ural Mountains, in the former USSR. They were mostly students at the Ural Polytechnic Institute. The expedition was led by Igor Dyatlov, 23, who will give his name to the mystery: the affair of “Dyatlov’s cabbage.”
On the night of February 1, 1959, the mountaineers had set up their bivouac on the slopes of Kholat Saykhl, the “Dead mountain”. But shortly after midnight, an event prompted members of the expedition to cut their tent canvas to escape in their underwear to the forest a kilometer below.
Some bodies were found with strange stains or empty eye sockets, others had traces of internal trauma without external marks. The body of one of them had a high level of radiation and a woman was tongueless.
Many crazy theories
An investigation had been opened and then quickly closed but many theories had been put forward: a yeti attack, a test of a secret weapon having gone wrong, a fall of rocket debris, an unknown psychic force having led the hikers to enter each other. -kill, murder by a tribe, nuclear accident …
Reopened in 2019, the official investigation concluded that the students had perished in an avalanche but they could not explain how this avalanche could have intervened on a very weak mountain slope, how it could have been triggered several hours after installation. of the bivouac, and why some of the victims had unusual injuries in this kind of drama.
A study published this week in the journal Communications Earth and Environnment confirms this thesis. According to her, a combination of factors triggered a delayed avalanche. It surprised the young people in their sleep, with temperatures around – 25 ºC. “Obviously, some gray areas will always remain”, admits one of the authors of the study Johan Gaume. “But we have finally put scientific evidence on the table.”
Disney and General Motors studios
The two authors of the study asked for help from the computer scientists at Disney studios who had designed the animations of the film. Snow Queen. Using meteorological and topographic parameters, they were able to model snow accumulation. The two researchers also combined their data with data General Motors had collected on injuries caused by crash tests of their SUV-sized cars, says Franceinfo.
