Disney Frozen ended up helping some investigators solve a 62-year-old cold case. Some new findings in Communications Earth and Environment show how these people used Pixar film technology to solve the Dyatlov Pass incident. For those who didn’t know, a team of students and their instructor went on a mountaineering expedition to the Ural Mountains in 1959. What followed was pretty horrible. His tent was found after a snowstorm was ripped from the inside and there were bodies scattered around nearby with traumatic injuries. People wondered how this could have happened without witnesses, and conspiracy theories soon began to emerge on all sides. Still, everything changed when a current researcher looked at it Frozen for the first time.
A few years ago, Gaume was surprised by the degree of representation of the movement of snow in the 2013 Disney film Frozen, in fact so impressed that he decided to ask his animators how they got it. He ended up going to Hollywood to chat with them. 14 / x pic.twitter.com/Nj34ejn7vo
– Dr. Robin George Andrews 🌋 (@SquigglyVolcano) January 28, 2021
In 2013, at the height of the Frozen fever, Johan Guame, of the snow avalanche simulation lab, marveled at how Disney was able to make snow so realistic. The technology to simulate that movement is unparalleled. Guame therefore emailed the animators to the query. From there he traveled to Los Angeles to meet with the specialist responsible for the movement on screen. The researcher obtained a version of the snow animation code for his avalanche simulations. Gaume sought to find out how avalanches would affect the human body.
In this catastrophe, the bodies of the travelers were found with extreme wounds, including blunt puncture wounds and cracked open skulls. It turns out that when a snow wall touches a precise angle, that ice can be like a projectile. With the data in hand, you could build a model to explain these terrible injuries with a very normal avalanche. The displacement of the bodies could be the result of some students trying to drag their friends to safety instead of leaving camp. It’s a wild adventure to think that a simple computer simulation could shed so much light on a 60-year-old box, but here it is.
“People don’t want it to be an avalanche,” Gaume says. “It’s too normal.”
Have you ever heard this story? Do you think the explanation makes sense? Let us know in the comments