The Science That Finally Explains the Dyatlov Pass Incident

During my graduate research, I was snowshoeing through the snow collecting data, giving my advisor an update of my research sites, and then we both felt the world shift beneath our feet. Terrified, we slowly crept our way back over to a copse of trees. The slab didn’t fall while we were there, but it did break loose and uproot some small trees before I went back out. My advisor said it wasn’t wise to kill her in an avalanche before she had the chance to sign off on my thesis.

I pulled this woman skiing out of a huge snow drift at mount tremblant Canada. Half way down a saw a single glove, then a pair of goggles. I stopped and looked around before seeing snow tracks leading to the edge of a trail. She was 3ft under in a small air pocket. Could barely here her as I walked to the edge. Took me 30min to pull her free. She was confused and explained the entire hill went and took her off the trail and buried her instantly. Crazy scary

Also consider that a person experiencing hypothermia in its last stages feels a flush of heat on the skin so intense that it sometimes drives them to actually remove clothing. More than one hypothermia victim has been found almost naked, their clothes in a pile next to their bodies.

Fun fact: one of the jobs of the Canadian military is to fire artillery into mountain and hillsides along highways and popular hiking and ski spots. It triggers controlled avalanches on purpose so that there isn't enough snow build up to lead to a spontaneous avalanche while a car is driving by or some hikers are camping below.

Here in Finland, we have hundreds of words and regional dialect terms for different types of snow and snowy conditions. There are around 100 different terms just for light, dry snow alone. Snow is surprisingly complex!

Whoever was responsible for the mood and tone of this episode, you guys did an amazing job!

appropriate sweater, I approve

Small radioactivity of clothes can be explained by the fact that some of them worked in military nuclear facility and it was 1959 - radiation health and safety measures and monitoring were underdeveloped, little understood and were thrown away in the race for the nuclear parity

As much as I know this story from several videos on it, this is by far the most logical and grounded explanation yet. If a say 100 pound chunk of snow hits your tent then its pretty logical to dip out there fearing the worse when you factor in reaction from waking up and disorientation from the cold slowing thought processes.

The scariest thought about avalanches, at least to me, is that once you're buried, it's often hard to tell which way is up. So, even if you're just near the surface, you don't know which way it is (unless you have enough space in front of your face to create enough warm air to let spit dribble out of your mouth as a liquid and feel which way it runs down your face--but then good luck actually digging yourself out plus you don't know how far down you actually are). Hope you're wearing a rescue beacon, the rescuers probably won't find you without one.

as a person who works with glacial ice as a detection medium, this video was so thorough and well explained, it's great

Regarding their actions, following the avalanche; it's worth remembering that as hypothermia sets in, the brain begins to fail before the body. I recall seeing an interview with a survivor of a shipwreck in the North Atlantic. He said that, as he sat on the upturned hull of his capsized boat, he knew he ought to fasten his coat. But he sat there with the two halves of the zipper in his hands and couldn't remember, or figure out, how they worked.

It is tragic to know that these young hikers actually contributed to their death by snow, while their knowledge failed them because Mother Nature acted in such a complicated way, it took teams of scientists so many decades later to simulate the disaster to figure out the probable disaster. RIP to the victims.

The radioactivity could be explained by the fact that 3 of the expedition members worked in Mayak institute, which is notorious for causing radiation pollution and literally exploded a couple of years before the incident, with one of the expedition members working on cleaning up after the Kyshtym disaster.