Disney Frozen came to help some researchers solve a cold case of 62 years. Some new discoveries from Communications Earth and Environment show how these people used the technology from the Pixar movie to solve the Dyatlov Pass incident. For those who didn’t know, a team of students and their instructor went on a mountaineering expedition in the Ural Mountains in 1959. What followed was quite horrible. Their tent was found after a snowstorm broke out from inside and there were bodies scattered around nearby areas with traumatic injuries. People wondered how this could have happened without witnesses, and conspiracy theories soon began to appear on all sides. However, everything changed when a current researcher followed Frozen for the first time.
A few years ago, Gaume was surprised at how well the snow movement was described in the 2013 Disney film Frozen – so impressed, in fact, that he decided to ask his 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 ice fever, Johan Guame of the Snow Avalanche Simulation Lab was amazed at how Disney managed to make snow so realistic. The technology to simulate that movement was unmatched. So Guame emailed the animators surveys. From there, he traveled to Los Angeles to meet with 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 figure out how avalanches would affect the human body.
In this catastrophe, the bodies of the passengers were found with extreme wounds, including blunt force wounds and cracked open skulls. It seems 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 that explains these terrible injuries with a very normal avalanche. The movement of the bodies could be the result of some of the students trying to pull their friends safely instead of leaving the camp. It’s a wild ride to think that a simple computer simulation could shed so much light on a 60-year-old carcass, but here it is.
“People don’t want it to be an avalanche,” says Gaume. “It’s too normal.”
Have you ever heard this story? Do you think the explanation makes sense? Tell us in the comments