Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959
Johan Gaume and Alexander M. Puzrin, Communications Earth & Environment 2:10 (2021) · 28 January 2021
The most-cited modern attempt to give the avalanche hypothesis a physical mechanism. It is worth reading in full rather than in summary, because what it claims is narrower than what it is usually reported to claim.
Open the PDF — 11 pages, 1.9 MB
Hosted here in full. Nothing has been re-compressed, re-OCR’d or altered.
What is on which page
p.1
The abstract states the problem the paper is answering: the avalanche hypothesis “was found to be inconsistent with the evidence of a lower-than-usual slope angle, scarcity of avalanche signs, uncertainties about the trigger mechanism, and abnormal injuries of the victims.”
p.5
The result. Simulation using the Material Point Method and finite-strain elastoplasticity shows “this small-slab avalanche impacted the hikers lying on the tent floor and filled the excavated space but did not have a significant runout, consistent with the reported lack of clear avalanche signs.” The small runout is the point: it is what reconciles an avalanche with a slope that showed no obvious avalanche afterwards.
p.6
The authors' own statement of scope — the mechanism they describe had not been explored in the avalanche literature before, and its quantification required new modelling. The paper offers a physically possible mechanism; it does not claim to establish what happened that night.
Provenance and licence
Released by: Johan Gaume and Alexander M. Puzrin, Communications Earth & Environment 2:10 (2021).
Original copy: Nature, Communications Earth & Environment. We did not obtain this document; we are hosting a copy so that the citation in the case file resolves to something durable.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) — redistribution permitted with attribution. The licence statement appears on p.10 of the paper.
How this copy was checked: Downloaded from the publisher's DOI. Title, authors, journal, volume and article number were read from p.1 of the file itself, and the CC BY 4.0 statement from p.10.
11 pages · 1.9 MB · PDF