The Diatlov Pass incident: they unravel one of the mysteries behind many conspiracy theories

PASO DIÁTLOV.-Nine young Russian mountaineers, two women and seven men, died under strange circumstances during a skiing expedition in the Ural Mountains during the first days of February 1959. The event, known as the name of Diatlov Pass incident, in honor of the leader of the expedition, eventually became one of the most famous and intriguing mysteries of the 20th century. The last known to hikers was that something unexpected – and hitherto unknown – did the young people cut the tent from the inside at midnight on February 1 and fled into a forest more than a kilometer away, without adequate clothing, with extremely low temperatures, below -25 ° C and with strong winds behind.

Historical records of the case indicate that twenty-six days after the tragedy, search teams found the first frozen bodies in the forest. The last bodies appeared three months later, naked, some with mutilations and beatings to the chest and face. According to research 1959 Soviet criminal, “An irresistible natural force” he had caused the death of Diatlov’s group. Despite the verdict, the Russian government never presented any evidence or clearly explained what happened. A few months later, he closed the case and banned the area from the event for several years.

This shortcoming of the investigation, added to the testimonies of alleged sightings of bright orange spheres which floated in the sky during that night and to the alleged traces of radioactivity found on the clothes of the climbers, made the relatives of the deceased of the official version. In the absence of a logical explanation that would reveal the causes of death, Conspiracy theories surrounding the Diatlov case have spread throughout Russia. Some claimed that the hikers died from infrasound-induced panic, others that they were attacked by wild animals (two of the corpses were missing their eyes, another the tongue and a third the eyebrows) and others that the members of the local tribes were those. responsible for the dead. It was even believed that they had been subjected to the fury of the abominable snowman, that they had been the victims of nuclear tests or that the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, had killed them for political reasons.

What was the real reason the skiers had to leave their tents? How did they die? In an unprecedented decision, the Russian prosecution has decided to reopen the case in 2019 and in 2020 reported that an avalanche of snow this was the real cause of the tragedy. The explanation, once again, was not sufficient for the few relatives of the victims still alive or for the hundreds of onlookers who make a pilgrimage to the scene every year.

Faced with the new official hypothesis, the disbelievers put forward four arguments questioning the possibility of the avalanche: 1) The research team arrived 26 days after the tragedy did not report any obvious signs of an avalanche. 2) The average slope angle (less than 30 degrees) overlooking the tent site was not steep enough to produce an avalanche. 3) The hypothetical avalanche fell overnight, at least nine hours after the climbers set up camp. 4) Injuries to the chest and skull of the deceased were not typical of avalanche victims.

Johan Gaume, director of the snow and avalanche simulation laboratory University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Alexander Puzrin, professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and an expert in snow slides, they decided to study a quantifiable physical model that would establish whether the avalanche hypothesis was compatible with seemingly contradictory data. The conclusions of his work, which were published in the latest issue of Nature magazine, show that a small patch of snow may have come off the mountain, beating the hikers in their sleep and forcing them to rush out of the camp.

Puzrin tells by email that the simulations of his work have shown that “the incident was the result of a combination of three unfavorable circumstances: a cut in the snow patch during the installation of the tent, a particular topography and strong katabatic winds. [masas de aire que se desplazan a gran velocidad ladera abajo] which carried snow and overloaded the slab of snow, which broke and produced the avalanche on the store ”. To explain what happened, the researchers built a physical mechanism that simulates slab avalanches caused by the gradual accumulation of windblown snow on a slope similar to that on which hikers pitch their tents.

“The identification of such a mechanism,” says Puzrin, “may provide new insight into the nature of instabilities caused by storms in the snow cover, which is another important motivation for this work”. The two researchers’ model also reconciles the latency time, estimated from the forensic investigation, with the wind speeds observed at weather stations that night. He also provided the dimensions of the detached plate, which it has been shown to cause serious, but not fatal, injuries consistent with autopsy injuries found on dead young people.

In addition to clarifying the reasons for the death of these nine young people, the investigation serves to rethink snow avalanche studies. “The new models, developed in this work, will allow a better understanding of the mechanisms of natural avalanches, caused by the slow accumulation of snow, rather than by the dynamic impact of skiers, vehicles and explosions”, specifies Puzrin.

© El País, SL

THE NATION

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