This is a great read, especially if you've ever been interested in the Dyatlov Pass incident. If anyone is interested, here's a summary of the Incident, and a summary of the theory presented by...
This is a great read, especially if you've ever been interested in the Dyatlov Pass incident. If anyone is interested, here's a summary of the Incident, and a summary of the theory presented by this article.
Summary of Incident: 9 Russian hikers made camp in the Dyatlov Pass, in the middle of nowhere. They all died and were found about 3 weeks later. Their tent was mostly buried and had been cut from the inside to allow them out. Each person was not in the tent, they were in various states of undress, some had catastrophic injuries seemingly caused by blunt force trauma, but also some other very gruesome injuries (missing body parts / soft tissue). Many people see this as a supernatural incident / catastrophe, where an unidentified monster killed people.
Summary of this article's theory
The tent was struck by a small avalanche; there is a compelling amount of evidence that suggests the likelihood of this in the article. This caused the blunt force trauma to some of the hikers, and all of them tried to escape together. The state of undress can be attributed to Paradoxical Undressing - in lethal hypothermia, sometimes people remove all their clothes as they are dying. The more gruesome injuries - missing body parts, such as eyes and tongue - is potentially attributable to scavenging animals.
I recommend reading the article, but that's a TL;DR if you want the basics of the situation.
IIRC this behavior is thought to potentially be due to nerve damage, and vasodilation occurring near death that causes warmer, body-core blood to rush to the extremities. And because of that,...
The state of undress can be attributed to Paradoxical Undressing - in lethal hypothermia, sometimes people remove all their clothes as they are dying
IIRC this behavior is thought to potentially be due to nerve damage, and vasodilation occurring near death that causes warmer, body-core blood to rush to the extremities. And because of that, despite being in the process of freezing to death, people experiencing severe hypothermia might actually feel like they are overheating, and when combined with delirium results in them stripping their clothes off to try to combat that.
And another weird behavior often seen in hypothermia deaths is "terminal burrowing", which typically occurs soon after the undressing, where the person forces themselves into a confined space (e.g. a hole dug into a snow bank), where they curl up into a foetal position before expiring. The reasoning for that seems more obvious, but is actually less well understood/studied.
For anyone who doesn't know the seemingly bizarre story of the Dyatlov Pass incident, I highly recommend checking out LEMMiNO's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RigxxiilI
For anyone who doesn't know the seemingly bizarre story of the Dyatlov Pass incident, I highly recommend checking out LEMMiNO's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RigxxiilI
This is one of those mysteries that I don’t get. Without even reading the article I can summarize the obvious theory: there was a storm or some other environmental issue that caused damage to the...
This is one of those mysteries that I don’t get. Without even reading the article I can summarize the obvious theory: there was a storm or some other environmental issue that caused damage to the tent, they were undressed because that is a weird side effect of advanced hypothermia, and the damage to their bodies was from scavengers.
There’s way more compelling mysteries out there, this one is Occam’s Razor all the way.
Perhaps you should have read the article (or aphoenix's summary of it, or watched the video I linked to), because your summary completely glosses over all the interesting details which make this...
Perhaps you should have read the article (or aphoenix's summary of it, or watched the video I linked to), because your summary completely glosses over all the interesting details which make this case more complicated and compelling than your Occam's razor theorizing suggests.
E.g. The "damage to the tent" you mentioned can't just be explained by a "storm" or "environmental damage" alone, as not only was it collapsed and partially buried, but it was also sliced open in several places (likely from the inside using knives). And while the soft tissue damage to some of their bodies can be explained by postmortem scavenging (and decomposition), the blunt force trauma (including a cracked skull and internal bleeding) thought to be the eventual cause or a contributing factor in the deaths of several of them, cannot be explained by that.
But the absolute key issue you missed entirely, that is the root cause of all the mystery surrounding this case in the first place, is that there was always thought to be no evidence to explain why all the extremely experienced mountaineers and hikers in this group suddenly felt the need to escape from their tent, and entirely abandon their camp during the middle of a blizzard without taking any of their supplies with them. Several of them even left their shoes behind!
However, this new theory, and the computer simulation to back it up, has shown that they could have been hit by a rare type of delayed, small-scale, slab avalanche, which doesn't leave a whole lot of evidence behind afterwards, but can still cause significant bodily harm to those caught in/under it. This would potentially explain the blunt force trauma, why they thought they had to cut their way out of the tent (since they might have assumed they were completely buried), and also why they might have immediately fled to the treeline after they escaped it without collecting their gear first (perhaps thinking that another, larger avalanche was imminent).
p.s. I personally think LEMMiNO's theory about the broken stove pipe causing smoke to overwhelm them in the tent might also still have been a factor too though... since it would help further explain their panicked escape from the tent, and might also help explain why they weren't able to collect their gear from within the tent before being force to flee to the treeline.
This is a great read, especially if you've ever been interested in the Dyatlov Pass incident. If anyone is interested, here's a summary of the Incident, and a summary of the theory presented by this article.
Summary of Incident: 9 Russian hikers made camp in the Dyatlov Pass, in the middle of nowhere. They all died and were found about 3 weeks later. Their tent was mostly buried and had been cut from the inside to allow them out. Each person was not in the tent, they were in various states of undress, some had catastrophic injuries seemingly caused by blunt force trauma, but also some other very gruesome injuries (missing body parts / soft tissue). Many people see this as a supernatural incident / catastrophe, where an unidentified monster killed people.
Summary of this article's theory
The tent was struck by a small avalanche; there is a compelling amount of evidence that suggests the likelihood of this in the article. This caused the blunt force trauma to some of the hikers, and all of them tried to escape together. The state of undress can be attributed to Paradoxical Undressing - in lethal hypothermia, sometimes people remove all their clothes as they are dying. The more gruesome injuries - missing body parts, such as eyes and tongue - is potentially attributable to scavenging animals.
I recommend reading the article, but that's a TL;DR if you want the basics of the situation.
IIRC this behavior is thought to potentially be due to nerve damage, and vasodilation occurring near death that causes warmer, body-core blood to rush to the extremities. And because of that, despite being in the process of freezing to death, people experiencing severe hypothermia might actually feel like they are overheating, and when combined with delirium results in them stripping their clothes off to try to combat that.
And another weird behavior often seen in hypothermia deaths is "terminal burrowing", which typically occurs soon after the undressing, where the person forces themselves into a confined space (e.g. a hole dug into a snow bank), where they curl up into a foetal position before expiring. The reasoning for that seems more obvious, but is actually less well understood/studied.
For anyone who doesn't know the seemingly bizarre story of the Dyatlov Pass incident, I highly recommend checking out LEMMiNO's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RigxxiilI
This is one of those mysteries that I don’t get. Without even reading the article I can summarize the obvious theory: there was a storm or some other environmental issue that caused damage to the tent, they were undressed because that is a weird side effect of advanced hypothermia, and the damage to their bodies was from scavengers.
There’s way more compelling mysteries out there, this one is Occam’s Razor all the way.
Perhaps you should have read the article (or aphoenix's summary of it, or watched the video I linked to), because your summary completely glosses over all the interesting details which make this case more complicated and compelling than your Occam's razor theorizing suggests.
E.g. The "damage to the tent" you mentioned can't just be explained by a "storm" or "environmental damage" alone, as not only was it collapsed and partially buried, but it was also sliced open in several places (likely from the inside using knives). And while the soft tissue damage to some of their bodies can be explained by postmortem scavenging (and decomposition), the blunt force trauma (including a cracked skull and internal bleeding) thought to be the eventual cause or a contributing factor in the deaths of several of them, cannot be explained by that.
But the absolute key issue you missed entirely, that is the root cause of all the mystery surrounding this case in the first place, is that there was always thought to be no evidence to explain why all the extremely experienced mountaineers and hikers in this group suddenly felt the need to escape from their tent, and entirely abandon their camp during the middle of a blizzard without taking any of their supplies with them. Several of them even left their shoes behind!
However, this new theory, and the computer simulation to back it up, has shown that they could have been hit by a rare type of delayed, small-scale, slab avalanche, which doesn't leave a whole lot of evidence behind afterwards, but can still cause significant bodily harm to those caught in/under it. This would potentially explain the blunt force trauma, why they thought they had to cut their way out of the tent (since they might have assumed they were completely buried), and also why they might have immediately fled to the treeline after they escaped it without collecting their gear first (perhaps thinking that another, larger avalanche was imminent).
p.s. I personally think LEMMiNO's theory about the broken stove pipe causing smoke to overwhelm them in the tent might also still have been a factor too though... since it would help further explain their panicked escape from the tent, and might also help explain why they weren't able to collect their gear from within the tent before being force to flee to the treeline.