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Author Topic: 2019 Russian TV expedition - need details  (Read 11373 times)

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November 15, 2023, 07:40:08 PM
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kylecorbin


Forum member Axelrod discovered this YouTube video of an expedition to Dyatlov Pass four years ago in which people tried to duplicate the 1959 tent in a deep-snow area as close as possible to the correct one:



Does anyone know the details of this expedition? I cannot read Russian, so if the YouTube write-up gives any details or a link to a web page about it, I don't see it. Surely an expedition as expensive as this one would have set up a web page to reveal what they determined.

Here is transcript Axelrod found (autotranslated) starting at about 7 minutes 40 seconds. Another transcript of some sort is given at the video page. Below this transcript are my comments.

------------------
My goal was, first of all, to understand: was an avalanche possible here, or was it impossible to expect here? I can say that this slope is definitely avalanche dangerous. This is confirmed primarily by the steepness of this slope; here it exceeds 20°. This is a completely ordinary slope for an avalanche. Because the minimum angles at which avalanches are recorded is 15°.

If an avalanche descended on a tent, then along the maximum slope. The tent was placed partly in the part where there was protection from stones, and partly outside it. And this is confirmed by measurements. Let me try it on. At this point (in the center of the tent) the snow thickness is 159 cm. And if you go to that point (from the corner at the entrance of the tent), then it is 105 cm. In any case, 50-60 cm less.

And so the avalanche, when it came from above, it naturally bent here. And she went like this to the left. And the tent was only affected on one side! Was it an avalanche, or a shift in the layer of snow, it’s hard to say now. But in any case, both the gloss and the avalanche – they could have gone away. If this is a shift of a snow layer, or a snow board, then it is quite dense in nature… (shakes his hands, showing). Density, which can reach 0.5 g/cm³, or 1 cubic meter – that’s half a ton!. If such a mass simply collapses the tent… Imagine, there are people lying here. And only one cubic meter moves. And it could have shifted more. Weight – half a ton! If such a load puts pressure on a person, and the person is pressed against something solid, it could be a ski, a binding, or a metal pot. Possible injuries – time! The weight may cause broken ribs – two that were recorded. Weighs half a ton!

And according to my version… I say, this is my version. I do not insist that this is exactly what happened, but at least it does not contradict the thoughts that appear to me. The guys who were lying on this edge were injured by the avalanche. The guys who were lying on the other side were not injured. But since the tent was covered on this side, the support was broken. Everyone is pinned down by this dense, icy mass, making it difficult to get them out. They shout: they are hurt!

In order to pull them out, an incision is made. Because they pull out and first free the wounded. It is clear that it was necessary to free the tent from the snow. But in that situation… night, cold and wind. Well, I can't say it was panic. The guys were experienced. But nevertheless, it is a nervous environment. They pull them out through a slot in the tent. And they start going down. Probably the shoes were still there. It was completely filled with snow and ice.
------------------

The man in the video who uses the pole to measure the snow seems to be the one making the conjectures in the transcript. He seems to think that snow covered not nearly all of Dyatlov's tent, and that it soon filled most of the inside of the tent with snow. He thinks the snow there was extremely dense and accounted for the broken ribs of the victims. (Again, remember that I cannot understand ANY Russian words.) He thinks some of the victims got out of the less-covered part of the tent and helped the ones who were trapped in the snow-covered part of the tent. I don't think he has read many of the 1959 witness statements. I hope that once I get a full translation of this 2019 expedition's findings, I will think differently, but for now, his logic is poor. We know that the cuts were made from the inside, not from people outside cutting in to get to those trapped inside. We know there were no external injuries corresponding to the broken ribs and cracked skull, so those injuries could not have come from direct impact (not by falling down or crashing into something or something crashing into them), and we know that after the bones were broken, the victims couldn't have walked far, so we know that almost none of that happened inside the tent, because all nine walked a mile afterwards. And if as he says most of the entrance area of the tent was not covered by significant snow, then some people would have exited there, and the boots were next to the exit, and the stove, and that area would of course have given access to some of the coats, gloves, and other crucial items. The fact that almost none of those items were gotten out, and the fact that the tent items showed no sign of having been in a disaster, mean that the man's whole approach is wrong. Maybe he's just a TV reporter there filming the actual expedition and giving his own guesses, and maybe he says at the start that he has not read much about the case.

At any rate, it would be very helpful to find out what this expedition discovered.
 

November 15, 2023, 09:55:15 PM
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Олег Таймень

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This is a joint expedition of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper and television show host Andrei Malakhov.
In the middle of the video, you see Natalia Varsegova talking to the camera.
At the end of the video you see a glaciologist who assures that it was definitely an avalanche that killed the group. But, there is a nuance... The glaciologist in the first sentences said that he had a version and he came to confirm it. I think after these words of his, it becomes clear to everyone what to expect from him.
Это совместная экспедиция газеты Комсомольская правда и телевизионного шоу-ведущего Андрея Малахова.
В середине ролика вы видите Наталью Варсегову, которая рассказывает на камеру.
В конце видео вы видите гляциолога, который уверяет, что это точно сошла лавина и погубила группу. Но, есть нюанс.. Гляциолог в первых же предложениях сказал, что у него есть версия и он приехал её подтвердить. Думаю, после этих его слов, для всех становится понятно, что от него ждать.
...
Thank you for the video. I haven't seen it before. Now I will show the topic to the Russian-speaking public..
« Last Edit: November 16, 2023, 08:35:18 AM by Олег Таймень »
If a mountain comes towards you, and you are not Mohammed, then it is a rockfall.
 
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November 16, 2023, 02:35:42 AM
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Олег Таймень

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If a mountain comes towards you, and you are not Mohammed, then it is a rockfall.
 

November 16, 2023, 04:05:13 AM
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kylecorbin


Thanks. I look forward to studying all this. I knew there had been many expeditions to the Pass but did not know this much expense and camera recording had been used.

Richard Holmgren from Sweden, who in 2019 discovered the key "katabatic wind" aspect of the solution to the 1959 deaths, was there on the exact 60-year anniversary of the tragedy (Feb. 1, 2019, in the coldest part of winter), before the Russian TV crew arrived a month later, and said this when asked about them:

"[Their] visit to the site is done with snowmobiles and not by skiing. Since they brought a tent [to] study (not for sleeping) and the weather in [their] video seems rather warm, I think it was made in March. If I remember correctly, this was one of two visits made in connection with the Russian studies that same year. We came to the site in Jan/Feb and some weeks after that, the crew that made the film for "Expedition Unknown" arrived. They slept elsewhere but had a similar tent for their production. However, that canvas was never brought to the site - so the tent in the film you're here referring to, must be for the Russian studies made in March."


This is a joint expedition of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper and television show host Andrei Malakhov.
In the middle of the video, you see Natalia Varsegova talking to the camera.
At the end of the video you see a glaciologist who assures that it was definitely an avalanche that killed the group. But, there is a nuance... The glaciologist in the first sentences said that he had a version and he came to confirm it. I think after these words of his, it becomes clear to everyone what to expect from him. Another pull of the owl onto the globe.
...
Thank you for the video. I haven't seen it before. Now I will show the topic to the Russian-speaking public..
 

November 16, 2023, 06:19:02 AM
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WAB


Forum member Axelrod discovered this YouTube video of an expedition to Dyatlov Pass four years ago

I have a question: why look for something that is readily available? All of this was relevant in 2019, but now it's just gone into the shadows.

in which people tried to duplicate the 1959 tent in a deep-snow area as close as possible to the correct one:

There's something wrong with that phrase....
5 years before (Feb 2014) we already did the same thing.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1A9VG1d4W0oT4RhHDUNu4BoFdqti-1-8j?usp=drive_link

however in the movie being discussed, they chose the location of the shawl with an error of about 100 m (300 ft). This follows from the way the surveyors on this expedition determined the location. It was obvious to me from the surrounding landmarks in the video picture, as I know the area around the "pass" very well and in detail.



Does anyone know the details of this expedition?

If you search well on the Internet, you can easily find information that Shura (Alexander Alekseenkov) and I were there 1 week earlier and conducted a more extensive set of experiments. The description is at the link

 https://pereval1959.kamrbb.ru/?x=read&razdel=17&tema=212&start=0 .

 The one who wrote it - Shura - is Alexander Alekseenkov .
There are detailed links to photos and videos of all the events of this expedition. The key experiment on possible occurrence of any snow shift is described at the link

https://taina.li/forum/index.php?msg=816692 .

 Briefly we can say that the results are as follows:
1. If one shifts the layer by the weakest layer, it turns out that the shear force should be 13.5 times greater than the possible force that shifts the layer at the specific place where the tent was standing. And this is without taking into account the fact that the studied layer must be torn off from the main snow on the slope. For which an even greater force is required.
2. The slope above and partly below has a slope of 17...18 degrees. These are measured values for 2 and 3 different winter expeditions. An attempt to find a greater steepness can only be successful over a length of 2...3 m (6...10 ft).
3. There is practically no loose snow thicker than 30 cm (1 ft) on the slope, although all avalanche authors assume loose snow thicknesses comparable to the full thickness of snow on the slope. By the way, the snow layer on the slope is homogeneous, and has a high density and adhesion between all layers (tensile strength).
All this is tested practically, on a specific place and in different winter months of different years.

I cannot read Russian, so if the YouTube write-up gives any details or a link to a web page about it, I don't see it.

Many readers of this forum from Russia can't read English either, but they use translators and understand everything perfectly. I can understand when you need to understand speech in a video, but I don't understand how you can not understand the translated text in the above pages. I'm also too lazy to write everything at once in English, but after machine translation I review it and correct what seems unclear.
By the way, if it's not enough what google translator can do, you can use deepl.com on the internet . friends from Germany suggested it to me and I compared it with google . I found it more reliable and adequate. Although I use our PROMPT-PRO more often. It takes me much more time to write in English on my own and I constantly have to look up the relevant English terms in a dictionary (ABBYY Lingvo).
Anyway, I am not lazy to spend time on searching and analyzing if I want to understand my interlocutor better.

Surely an expedition as expensive as this one would have set up a web page to reveal what they determined.

What you saw in that video is television and newspaper (Komsomolskaya Pravda - KP for short) PR, but not a scientific research report. That's why there are such incomprehensible judgments. Everything is designed for the emotions of viewers, not for the analysis of experts.
By the way, the fact that they walked directly in our footsteps, but did not realize it is well seen in one of the videos:

https://disk.yandex.ru/i/_9yUQbxkOpYPDw

This is a frame from the video of this expedition, where you can see a snow-covered lath with divisions, which we used 1 week before them.
And here is the same lath, when we measured snow properties on the place where the tent stood:

https://disk.yandex.ru/i/t8GlKMIHjP158g

It should be noted that they did not carry out completely the complex that we did, although 5 years before that we had coordinated it completely with that avalanche specialist - Prof. Victor V Popovnin - who was in the TV and newspaper expedition. We fully took into account all the recommendations he gave us.

Here is transcript Axelrod found (autotranslated) starting at about 7 minutes 40 seconds. Another transcript of some sort is given at the video page. Below this transcript are my comments.

------------------
My goal was, first of all, to understand: was an avalanche possible here, or was it impossible to expect here? I can say that this slope is definitely avalanche dangerous. This is confirmed primarily by the steepness of this slope; here it exceeds 20°. This is a completely ordinary slope for an avalanche. Because the minimum angles at which avalanches are recorded is 15°.

If an avalanche descended on a tent, then along the maximum slope. The tent was placed partly in the part where there was protection from stones, and partly outside it. And this is confirmed by measurements. Let me try it on. At this point (in the center of the tent) the snow thickness is 159 cm. And if you go to that point (from the corner at the entrance of the tent), then it is 105 cm. In any case, 50-60 cm less.

And so the avalanche, when it came from above, it naturally bent here. And she went like this to the left. And the tent was only affected on one side! Was it an avalanche, or a shift in the layer of snow, it’s hard to say now. But in any case, both the gloss and the avalanche – they could have gone away. If this is a shift of a snow layer, or a snow board, then it is quite dense in nature… (shakes his hands, showing). Density, which can reach 0.5 g/cm³, or 1 cubic meter – that’s half a ton!. If such a mass simply collapses the tent… Imagine, there are people lying here. And only one cubic meter moves. And it could have shifted more. Weight – half a ton! If such a load puts pressure on a person, and the person is pressed against something solid, it could be a ski, a binding, or a metal pot. Possible injuries – time! The weight may cause broken ribs – two that were recorded. Weighs half a ton!

And according to my version… I say, this is my version. I do not insist that this is exactly what happened, but at least it does not contradict the thoughts that appear to me. The guys who were lying on this edge were injured by the avalanche. The guys who were lying on the other side were not injured. But since the tent was covered on this side, the support was broken. Everyone is pinned down by this dense, icy mass, making it difficult to get them out. They shout: they are hurt!

In order to pull them out, an incision is made. Because they pull out and first free the wounded. It is clear that it was necessary to free the tent from the snow. But in that situation… night, cold and wind. Well, I can't say it was panic. The guys were experienced. But nevertheless, it is a nervous environment. They pull them out through a slot in the tent. And they start going down. Probably the shoes were still there. It was completely filled with snow and ice.
------------------

The man in the video who uses the pole to measure the snow seems to be the one making the conjectures in the transcript. He seems to think that snow covered not nearly all of Dyatlov's tent, and that it soon filled most of the inside of the tent with snow.

Yes, it is. You got it right. That's exactly what he said, but it's completely implausible given all the conditions necessary for it to happen.

He thinks the snow there was extremely dense and accounted for the broken ribs of the victims. (Again, remember that I cannot understand ANY Russian words.)

You got that right, too. Only there is an insurmountable contradiction: if the snow is dense and hard (to the ground, which exists in fact at that place at that time!), how could it move? Given our own research, which they didn't do...?
And then, what kind of selective "self-guided and infrared-guided formation" (sorry, I'm a missile expert after all...  grin1 ) that destroyed the ribs of only two people, but didn't cause any damage to the other seven people?
How they traveled 1.5 km (0.8 mi) afterward remains highly problematic. Especially if the fate of the 2 other head injuries, which in such a case it was almost impossible to get at this location.
With 5 people left, there is categorically not enough to transport 4 more. From my rich practice of search and rescue it follows that four people (1 woman - Zina, I do not take into account...) can transport one person (in such conditions, not taking into account the strong wind and moving snow) for a distance of 1 km (0.54 mi) in a time of 1 hour.
Doing anything faster is completely unrealistic. And to transport 4 people would take another 6...7 hours. Only if there are still forces and possibilities. But this is an impossible fantasy.

He thinks some of the victims got out of the less-covered part of the tent and helped the ones who were trapped in the snow-covered part of the tent. I don't think he has read many of the 1959 witness statements. I hope that once I get a full translation of this 2019 expedition's findings, I will think differently, but for now, his logic is poor.

This is not only true for you and your logic, it is true for reality. For example, avalanche accidents are characterized by the fact that:
1. almost no one who was buried in the tent could not get out of it.
2. it happened that 1...2 people got out alive, but not more.
3. If people could not be pulled out of the rubble within 15...20 minutes, they died of suffocation. There is nothing to breathe there, as the snow crumbles into fine dust (the law of conservation and transformation of energy into work!) . Could have been a happy accident for 1...2 people, but there were 9?
4. ....
I could write a lot more from real events, but enough already.

We know that the cuts were made from the inside, not from people outside cutting in to get to those trapped inside. We know there were no external injuries corresponding to the broken ribs and cracked skull, so those injuries could not have come from direct impact (not by falling down or crashing into something or something crashing into them), and we know that after the bones were broken, the victims couldn't have walked far, so we know that almost none of that happened inside the tent, because all nine walked a mile afterwards.

That is absolutely correct. I simply gave examples from my numerous practices to support your notions.

And if as he says most of the entrance area of the tent was not covered by significant snow, then some people would have exited there, and the boots were next to the exit, and the stove, and that area would of course have given access to some of the coats, gloves, and other crucial items. The fact that almost none of those items were gotten out, and the fact that the tent items showed no sign of having been in a disaster, mean that the man's whole approach is wrong.

That's all right, too.

Maybe he's just a TV reporter there filming the actual expedition and giving his own guesses, and maybe he says at the start that he has not read much about the case.

No he is a specialist of very high level, and is well known in the world practice of avalanche research. He is a professor at Moscow Lomonosov University, which is among the 150 best universities in the world (in the 100 before the sanctions were imposed!). However, he was persuaded by the press and television to voice the opinion that was developed by the prosecutor's office, which was conducting its activities there. The result was a very negative reaction of public opinion, that is, people who are well acquainted with the case in fact.

At any rate, it would be very helpful to find out what this expedition discovered.

It opened up a very big discussion about how other people are just being hoodwinked...  grin1
And that the press and TV do not give true information, but work for their own PR.
By the way, this is typical of journalists in any country.
 
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