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Researchers dig into 60-year-old Russian mystery of hiker deaths – Mirage News

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Researchers from EPFL and ETH Zurich have conducted an original scientific study that puts forth a plausible explanation for the mysterious 1959 death of nine hikers in the Ural Mountains in the former Soviet Union. The tragic Dyatlov Pass Incident, as it came to be called, has spawned a number of theories, from murderous Yeti to secret military experiments.

In early October 2019, when an unknown caller rang EPFL professor Johan Gaume’s cell phone, he could hardly have imagined that he was about to confront one of the greatest mysteries in Soviet history. At the other end of the line, a journalist from New York asked for his expert insight into a tragedy that had occurred 60 years earlier in Russia’s northern Ural Mountains – one that has since come to be known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Gaume, head of EPFL’s Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory (SLAB) and visiting fellow at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, had never heard of the case, which the Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office had recently resurrected from Soviet-era archives. “I asked the journalist to call me back the following day so that I could gather more information. What I learned intrigued me.”

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A sporting challenge that ended in tragedy

On 27 January 1959, a ten-member group consisting mostly of students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, led by 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov – all seasoned cross-country and downhill skiers – set off on a 14-day expedition to the Gora Otorten mountain, in the northern part of the Soviet Sverdlovsk Oblast. At that time of the year, a route of this kind was classified Category III – the riskiest category – with temperatures falling as low as -30°C. On January 28, one member of the expedition, Yuri Yudin, decided to turn back. He never saw his classmates again.

Dyatlov’s group on February 1st on their way to Kholat Syakhl. © Courtesy of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation

When the group’s expected return date to the departure point, the village of Vizhay, came and went, a rescue team set out to search for them. On 26 February, they found the group’s tent, badly damaged, on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl – translated as “Death Mountain” – some 20 km south of the group’s destination. The group’s belongings had been left behind. Further down the mountain, beneath an old Siberian cedar tree, they found two bodies clad only in socks and underwear. Three other bodies, including that of Dyatlov, were subsequently found between the tree and the tent site; presumably, they had succumbed to hypothermia while attempting to return to the camp. Two months later, the remaining four bodies were discovered in a ravine beneath a thick layer of snow. Several of the deceased had serious injuries, such as fractures to the chest and skull.

I was so intrigued that I began researching this theory more deeply

What exactly happened?

The Soviet authorities investigated to determine the causes of this strange drama, but closed it after three months, concluding that a “compelling natural force” had caused the death of the hikers. In the absence of survivors, the sequence of events on the night of 1 to 2 February is unclear to this day, and has led to countless more or less fanciful theories, from murderous Yeti to secret military experiments.

The tent as it was discovered by the rescue group, on 26 Feb 1959. © Courtesy of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation

This is the mystery that Gaume was confronted with. “After the call from the American reporter, I began writing equations and figures on my blackboard, trying to understand what might have happened in purely mechanical terms,” he says. “When the reporter rang back, I told her it was likely that an avalanche had taken the group by surprise as they lay sleeping in the tent.” This theory, which is the most plausible, was also put forward by the Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office after the investigation was reopened in 2019 at the request of the victims’ relatives. But the lack of evidence and the existence of odd elements has failed to convince a large portion of Russian society. “I was so intrigued that I began researching this theory more deeply. I then contacted Professor Alexander Puzrin, chair of Geotechnical Engineering at ETH Zurich, whom I had met a month earlier at a conference in France.”

The Dyatlov Pass mystery has become part of Russia’s national folklore. When I told my wife that I was going to work on it, she looked at me with deep respect!

Gaume, originally from France, and Russian-born Puzrin worked together to comb through the archives, which had been opened to the public after the fall of the Soviet Union. They also spoke with other scientists and experts in the incident, and developed analytical and numerical models to reconstruct the avalanche that may have caught the nine victims unaware.

Dyatlov group monument erected in 1962 in Mihaylovskoe cemetery, Sverdlovsk. © Courtesy of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation

“The Dyatlov Pass mystery has become part of Russia’s national folklore. When I told my wife that I was going to work on it, she looked at me with deep respect!” says Puzrin. “I was quite keen to do it, especially because I had started working on slab avalanches two years earlier. My primary research is in the field of landslides; I study what happens when a certain amount of time elapses between when a landslide is triggered and when it actually occurs.” According to Gaume and Puzrin, this is what happened in 1959: the hikers had made a cut in the mountain’s snow-covered slope to set up their tent, but the avalanche didn’t occur until several hours later.

One of the main reasons why the avalanche theory is still not fully accepted is that the authorities have not provided an explanation of how it happened

Bridging the gaps in the investigation

“One of the main reasons why the avalanche theory is still not fully accepted is that the authorities have not provided an explanation of how it happened,” says Gaume. In fact, there are a number of points that contradict that theory: first, the rescue team did not find any obvious evidence of an avalanche or debris. Then the average angle of the slope above the tent site – less than 30° – was not steep enough for an avalanche. Also, if an avalanche occurred, it was triggered at least nine hours after the cut was made in the slope. And finally, the chest and skull injuries observed on some victims were not typical of avalanche victims.

Configuration of the Dyatlov group’s tent installed on a flat surface after making a cut in the slope below a small shoulder. Snow deposition above the tent is due to wind transport of snow. © Gaume/Puzrin

In their investigation, published in Communications Earth & Environment – a new journal by Nature Research – onJanuary 28, Gaume and Puzrin attempt to address these points. “We use data on snow friction and local topography to prove that a small slab avalanche could occur on a gentle slope, leaving few traces behind. With the help of computer simulations, we show that the impact of a snow slab can lead to injuries similar to those observed. And then, of course, there’s the time lag between the team cutting into the slope and the triggering of the event. That’s the main focus of our article. Previous investigators have been unable to explain how, in the absence of any snowfall that evening, an avalanche could have been triggered in the middle of the night. We had to come up with a new theory to explain it,” says Gaume.

Simulation of the dynamics of a snow-slab avalanche and its impact on a human body. © Gaume/Puzrin

On the night of the tragedy, one of the most important contributing factors was the presence of katabatic winds – i.e., winds that carry air down a slope under the force of gravity. These winds could have transported the snow, which would have then accumulated uphill from the tent due to a specific feature of the terrain that the team members were unaware of. “If they hadn’t made a cut in the slope, nothing would have happened. That was the initial trigger, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough. The katabatic wind probably drifted the snow and allowed an extra load to build up slowly. At a certain point, a crack could have formed and spread, causing the snow slab to release,” says Puzrin.

Johan Gaume and Alexander Puzrin making a proof of concept of the Dyatlov case in Davos, Switzerland. © Jamani Caillet

Both scientists are nevertheless cautious about their findings, and make it clear that much about the incident remains a mystery. “The truth, of course, is that no one really knows what happened that night. But we do provide strong quantitative evidence that the avalanche theory is plausible,” Puzrin continues.

The two models developed for this study – an analytical one for estimating the time required to trigger an avalanche, created by ETH Zurich, and SLAB’s numerical one for estimating the effect of avalanches on the human body – will be used to better understand natural avalanches and the associated risks. Gaume and Puzrin’s work stands as a tribute to Dyatlov’s team, who were confronted with a “compelling force” of nature. And, although they were unable to complete their treacherous expedition, they have given generations of scientists a perplexing enigma to solve.

Of the ten experienced hikers, only Yuri Yudin, who fell sick at the outset and had to return, survived. © Courtesy of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation

/Public Release. This material comes from the originating organization and may be of a point-in-time nature, edited for clarity, style and length. View in full here.

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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