Current Event 21/02/04

[yestoday]

---- [Current Events are bi-weekly writing assignments for my junior year history class. The instructions are to find a recent article, summarize it, and describe your personal opinion on it.]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/has-science-solved-history-greatest-adventure-mystery-dyatlov/ 

 

Ah, yes, my first non-K-Pop current event. It’s about time; I know you’re exhausted of me by now. The reason is that, really, nothing much worth writing about happened in that hemisphere recently, and frankly, it’s almost midnight and I don’t feel like going on another awful company rant or writing an essay of an album review on the new CIX mini (which, between you and me, I didn’t like that much as their previous albums.) Along with my ridiculous, unhealthy obsession in the seemingly innocent K-Pop genre, I also find interest in, uh, more messed up things, maybe. Like nine hikers found dead on a Russian mountain in 1959--undressed, skulls bashed in, missing eyes, and severed tongue. Now, I know this just took a dark turn, but hear me out: this is about how science discovered what actually happened to them. The answer is a lot more boring than suspected. It was, simply, snow--an avalanche. But, before you get disappointed, the article also states how they figured it out, which was a bit more interesting, delving in deeper into more science and less conspiracy. Skipping past the statistical bits to the fun part: they figured it out with the movie Frozen and its snow animation codes. The snow animation code was put into a simulator to recreate the weather conditions of the night the hikers went AWOL. With that, came a rare occurrence of an avalanche.

Now, yes, it does seem lame, but I thought it was cool. Honestly, I found this article from a meme. It was a picture of small dominoes leading up to a big domino; the small one was labeled “hans christian andersen writing the snow queen” and the large one was labeled “researchers using snow animations from Frozen II to recreate the exact weather conditions the night of the dyatlov pass incident and solving a 62 year old cold case.” I didn’t believe it at first, but then I found the article linked in the replies, so like any other curious man, I read it. It was National Geographic, too, so it was reliable enough, right? I had never heard of the Dyatlov Pass case prior to this, so it was intriguing reading about the details. Even after I found out the truth was a lot more lame than I anticipated, the described process on how the researchers figured it out was still cool to me. As a shameless Frozen lover, it blew my mind. What can I say, Elsa is hot and so is the insanely beautiful animation in the second movie. Besides, later on, it answers the questions of the other unnerving circumstances of the hikers’ bodies, which made it worth the read to the end. I learned a lot. It’s cool. I will look into more crazy mystery death cases to tell you about so you don’t have to continuously hear about K-Pop.