Disney’s Frozen he ended up helping some researchers solve a 62-year-old cold case. Some new findings in Communications Earth and Environment show how these people used technology from the Pixar movie to solve the Dyatlov Pass incident. For those unfamiliar, a team of students and their teacher went on a climbing trip in the Ural Mountains in 1959. What followed was awful. Their tent was found after a snowstorm opened from the inside and bodies were scattered throughout the nearby areas with traumatic injuries. People were wondering how this could have happened without any witnesses, and soon conspiracy theories began to go up from all sides. However, everything changed when a researcher looked today Frozen for the first time.
A few years ago, Gaume was struck by how well the movement of snow was portrayed in the Disney 2013 movie Frozen – so good, of course, that he decided to ask the animators how they pulled it off. He ended up going to Hollywood to talk to them. 14 / x pic.twitter.com/Nj34ejn7vo
– Dr Robin George Andrews 🌋 (@SquigglyVolcano) January 28, 2021
Back in 2013, at the height of the Frozen Fever, Johan Guame of Snow Avalanche Simulation Lab was amazed at how Disney could make such real snow. The technology to simulate that movement was unparalleled. So Guame emailed the animators to check out. From there, he traveled to Los Angeles to meet the expert in charge of the on-screen move. The researcher found a version of the snow animation code for his avalanche simulations. Gaume set out to work out how landslides affect the human body.
In this crash, the bodies of the passengers were found with very serious injuries including blunt force puncture wounds and a broken open skull. It turns out that when a snowball hits a precise angle, the ice can look like a projectile. With the data in hand, you could build a model to explain these grim injuries with a fairly typical avalanche. The movement of the body could be the result of some students trying to drag their friends to safety instead of just leaving camp. It’s a wild ride to think that a simple computer simulation could throw so much light on a 60-year-old issue, but here it is.
“People don’t want it to be an avalanche,” Gaume says. “It’s too normal.”
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