Disney’s Frozen ended up helping some researchers to solve a 62-year-old case. Some new discoveries in Communications Earth and Environment show how these people used Pixar’s film technology to resolve the Dyatlov Pass incident. For those who don’t know, a team of students and their instructor took part in a mountaineering expedition in the Ural Mountains in 1959. What followed was terrible. Their tent was found after a snowstorm opened from inside and bodies were scattered throughout the surrounding areas with traumatic injuries. People wondered how it could have happened without witnesses, and soon conspiracy theories started to bubble up from all sides. However, everything changed when a current researcher watched Frozen for the first time.
A few years ago, Gaume was impressed by the quality of the snow movement in the 2013 Disney film Frozen – so impressed, in fact, that he decided to ask the animators how they did it. He ended up going to Hollywood to talk to them. 14 / x pic.twitter.com/Nj34ejn7vo
– Dr. Robin George Andrews 🌋 (@SquigglyVolcano) January 28, 2021
In 2013, at the height of the freezing fever, Johan Guame, from the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory, marveled at how Disney was able to make snow so realistic. The technology to simulate this movement was unmatched. Then, Guame sent an email to the animators for investigation. From there, he traveled to Los Angeles to meet the specialist responsible for the movement on the screen. The researcher obtained a version of the snow animation code for his avalanche simulations. Gaume intended to find out how avalanches would affect the human body.
In this catastrophe, the bodies of travelers were found to have extreme injuries, including blunt puncture wounds and cracked open skulls. It turns out that when a snow wall reaches a precise angle, the ice can be like a projectile. With the data in hand, you could build a model to explain these horrible injuries with a very normal avalanche. The displacement of the bodies may be the result of some of the students trying to drag their friends to safety instead of simply leaving the camp. It is crazy to think that a simple computer simulation could shed so much light on a 60-year-old case, but here it is.
“People don’t want it to be an avalanche,” says Gaume. “It is very normal.”
Have you heard this story before? Do you think the explanation makes sense? Let us know in the comments