<h2 id="residue">What the finding does not explain</h2>
<div class="prose">
<p>These are documented facts that the finding is consistent with but does not account for, or accounts for only by assumption. Each is given with the best candidate explanation and with what is missing to settle it.</p>
</div>
<div class="tablewrap"><table class="rtab">
<thead><tr><th>Documented fact</th><th>Best candidate explanation</th><th>What is missing</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>Nobody dug the tent out. It was 1.5 km away and 256 m up; three of them later tried to reach it and died on the way.</td><td>There was no natural light of any kind: the moon had set at 11:27 and did not rise until 04:15, under overcast. The one lit flashlight was dropped on the slope. On the open slope the wind chill was −22 to −29 and falling; the forest gave shelter and fuel at once. Making a fire first was a reasonable decision. The return was attempted, by the three found on the line to the tent, after the fire had been going for an hour or more.</td><td>Nothing measurable. The file records only the outcome of the decision.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dyatlov's flashlight lay on the tent canvas on 5 to 10 cm of snow with none on top of it, 25 days later (fact 3 above).</td><td>Set down on the already snow-covered collapsed half by whoever left last, or dropped there; the site was net-erosional afterwards, which the ski poles and the tent standing clear also show. If a slab came down, the flashlight was placed after it.</td><td>The 26 February photographs of the flashlight in place, which exist but were not available at a resolution that shows the snow around it. No measurement can now be made.</td></tr>
<tr><td>No searcher saw any sign of an avalanche on 26 to 28 February, and Sogrin, at the site on 4 March, said so in terms (fact 7 above).</td><td>A slab of 12 to 20 m³ stopping on the platform leaves 0.3 to 0.5 m of debris that 25 days of wind reworks; Puzrin and Gaume watched a small slab trace vanish in under an hour in January 2022. A drift collapse of the tent roof leaves nothing at all.</td><td>Any 1959 photograph or sketch of a crown line above the tent. The absence is explained rather than confirmed, and this is the strongest surviving point against every slab version.</td></tr>
<tr><td>The floor of the snow den, the shelter the four dug into the bank, 14 fir tops and a birch, lay intact at 2.5 to 3 m depth with clothes laid out on it and nobody on it; the four bodies lay 6 m downstream in the stream bed under 2 to 2.5 m of snow (fact 15 above).</td><td>The four were at the stream edge, below the floor, when the overhanging bank gave way, or the bodies were carried down by the spring melt before 4 May. Kuryakov's collapse and Buyanov's later slide are both compatible with the protocol; nobody, including the prosecutors, has modelled either.</td><td>A mechanical model of the bank collapse using the protocol's geometry, and the original sketch dimensions of the ravine protocol (341–343).</td></tr>
<tr><td>Thibeaux-Brignolle's depressed, comminuted fracture of the right temporal region, 9 by 7 cm with a 3 by 3.5 cm bone defect, without a skin wound.</td><td>A load of 2.5 kN or more concentrated on the temple. Snow can supply it only as a hard, well-sintered slab or crust, 400 kPa or more, bearing on the whole depression with the head backed, or through a hard object between snow and bone; at the 100 kPa the model assigns its wind slab, a snow face delivers 0.6 kN. The finding reads the driven-in bone piece as a concentrated load from a stone or an ice edge in the stream bed as the collapsing snow drove him down, or from a fall onto one, and cannot say which.</td><td>The positions of stones in the stream bed under the bodies, and an examination of the fracture margins. Eduard Tumanov's claim that the rib fractures run "on different lines" would also be tested by the same exhumation.</td></tr>
<tr><td>The tracks began 15 to 40 m below the tent in two groups that merged after 30 to 40 m, and one track was made by a person wearing a single boot (facts 8 and 9 above).</td><td>Two exits: Zolotaryov and Thibeaux, the two who were dressed with footwear, through the entrance; the rest through the cuts. Hard crust at the tent takes no print. This is consistent with the file but not established by it.</td><td>Nothing that can now be measured.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Zolotaryov's right scapula: three ante-mortem fractures found at the 2018 exhumation and not in the 1959 act, and a possible defect of the right ilium.</td><td>A second contact in the same collapse: the snow drove him onto the stream-bed stones, or a narrower object struck his back as the bank came down. Nikitin reads one impact while lying on his back, Tumanov at least two blows with an object narrower than the scapula; a fall onto rocks, a den collapse onto uneven ground and a blow are all compatible.</td><td>Measurement of the fractures, which nobody has made, and the unexhumed bodies of Dubinina and Thibeaux-Brignolle, whose backs were also never opened in 1959.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Four watches stopped at 5:31, 8:45, 8:14 and 8:39.</td><td>A mechanical watch wound on the morning of 1 February runs about a day and a half; the stopping times record when the springs ran down and say nothing about when the wearers died. The finding does not use them. Gaume and Puzrin's forensic clock does use them, which weakens it.</td><td>Nothing; the fact is uninformative.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Beta contamination on three garments: 9,900, 5,600 and 5,000 decays per minute per 150 cm², halved by three hours' washing.</td><td>Surface dust is the most likely source. Krivonischenko had worked at Mayak, the plutonium plant near Chelyabinsk, and took part in the clean-up after its 1957 accident; Kolevatov had worked in a classified atomic laboratory; the group had trained in the East-Urals radioactive trace, the fallout zone of that accident. Kuryakov attributes it to that trace, Buyanov to global fallout. The finding needs neither.</td><td>An isotopic measurement of the garments, if they survive in the archive, to distinguish fission products of the Mayak mix from fallout.</td></tr>
<tr><td>The autopsy acts record samples taken for chemical and histological examination; the results are not in the file.</td><td>Routine loss, or the classification Ivanov described in 1990 when he wrote that the regional party secretary ordered everything "sealed and handed to the special section". The finding assumes no toxin was present; that assumption is untested.</td><td>The sheets themselves, in the archive of the Sverdlovsk bureau of forensic medicine or the FSB regional archive.</td></tr>
<tr><td>The hour at which they left the tent.</td><td>Between 21:00 and 23:30, from the examiner's 6 to 8 hours since the last meal for the slope three, the fire's duration, the walking times, and the temperature fall at Burmantovo. Kuryakov's "about 21:00" comes from the wind-chill curve; Gaume and Puzrin's "after midnight" from the watches. None is documented.</td><td>Nothing; the file has no clock for that night beyond the digestion estimate, which is written identically for five bodies with stomach contents from traces to 150 cm³.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Procedural oddities: Tempalov's note apparently dated 15 February, before the tent was found; the case has no registration number; the radiological expertise (sheets 370–378) was removed from the file on 10 July 1959 «как не относящиеся к делу», as not relating to the case, and kept in the special sector of the regional prosecutor's office.</td><td>A slip of the pen for the date (Kuryakov's reading, plausible and unproven); a case opened at the district level without registration; a classification order of the kind Ivanov described. None bears on the cause of death, and every rival theory needs them as much as this finding does.</td><td>The Sverdlovsk regional party archive for 1959, and the original of Tempalov's note.</td></tr>
</tbody></table></div>
Documented fact	Best candidate explanation	What is missing
Nobody dug the tent out. It was 1.5 km away and 256 m up; three of them later tried to reach it and died on the way.	There was no natural light of any kind: the moon had set at 11:27 and did not rise until 04:15, under overcast. The one lit flashlight was dropped on the slope. On the open slope the wind chill was −22 to −29 and falling; the forest gave shelter and fuel at once. Making a fire first was a reasonable decision. The return was attempted, by the three found on the line to the tent, after the fire had been going for an hour or more.	Nothing measurable. The file records only the outcome of the decision.
Dyatlov's flashlight lay on the tent canvas on 5 to 10 cm of snow with none on top of it, 25 days later (fact 3 above).	Set down on the already snow-covered collapsed half by whoever left last, or dropped there; the site was net-erosional afterwards, which the ski poles and the tent standing clear also show. If a slab came down, the flashlight was placed after it.	The 26 February photographs of the flashlight in place, which exist but were not available at a resolution that shows the snow around it. No measurement can now be made.
No searcher saw any sign of an avalanche on 26 to 28 February, and Sogrin, at the site on 4 March, said so in terms (fact 7 above).	A slab of 12 to 20 m³ stopping on the platform leaves 0.3 to 0.5 m of debris that 25 days of wind reworks; Puzrin and Gaume watched a small slab trace vanish in under an hour in January 2022. A drift collapse of the tent roof leaves nothing at all.	Any 1959 photograph or sketch of a crown line above the tent. The absence is explained rather than confirmed, and this is the strongest surviving point against every slab version.
The floor of the snow den, the shelter the four dug into the bank, 14 fir tops and a birch, lay intact at 2.5 to 3 m depth with clothes laid out on it and nobody on it; the four bodies lay 6 m downstream in the stream bed under 2 to 2.5 m of snow (fact 15 above).	The four were at the stream edge, below the floor, when the overhanging bank gave way, or the bodies were carried down by the spring melt before 4 May. Kuryakov's collapse and Buyanov's later slide are both compatible with the protocol; nobody, including the prosecutors, has modelled either.	A mechanical model of the bank collapse using the protocol's geometry, and the original sketch dimensions of the ravine protocol (341–343).
Thibeaux-Brignolle's depressed, comminuted fracture of the right temporal region, 9 by 7 cm with a 3 by 3.5 cm bone defect, without a skin wound.	A load of 2.5 kN or more concentrated on the temple. Snow can supply it only as a hard, well-sintered slab or crust, 400 kPa or more, bearing on the whole depression with the head backed, or through a hard object between snow and bone; at the 100 kPa the model assigns its wind slab, a snow face delivers 0.6 kN. The finding reads the driven-in bone piece as a concentrated load from a stone or an ice edge in the stream bed as the collapsing snow drove him down, or from a fall onto one, and cannot say which.	The positions of stones in the stream bed under the bodies, and an examination of the fracture margins. Eduard Tumanov's claim that the rib fractures run "on different lines" would also be tested by the same exhumation.
The tracks began 15 to 40 m below the tent in two groups that merged after 30 to 40 m, and one track was made by a person wearing a single boot (facts 8 and 9 above).	Two exits: Zolotaryov and Thibeaux, the two who were dressed with footwear, through the entrance; the rest through the cuts. Hard crust at the tent takes no print. This is consistent with the file but not established by it.	Nothing that can now be measured.
Zolotaryov's right scapula: three ante-mortem fractures found at the 2018 exhumation and not in the 1959 act, and a possible defect of the right ilium.	A second contact in the same collapse: the snow drove him onto the stream-bed stones, or a narrower object struck his back as the bank came down. Nikitin reads one impact while lying on his back, Tumanov at least two blows with an object narrower than the scapula; a fall onto rocks, a den collapse onto uneven ground and a blow are all compatible.	Measurement of the fractures, which nobody has made, and the unexhumed bodies of Dubinina and Thibeaux-Brignolle, whose backs were also never opened in 1959.
Four watches stopped at 5:31, 8:45, 8:14 and 8:39.	A mechanical watch wound on the morning of 1 February runs about a day and a half; the stopping times record when the springs ran down and say nothing about when the wearers died. The finding does not use them. Gaume and Puzrin's forensic clock does use them, which weakens it.	Nothing; the fact is uninformative.
Beta contamination on three garments: 9,900, 5,600 and 5,000 decays per minute per 150 cm², halved by three hours' washing.	Surface dust is the most likely source. Krivonischenko had worked at Mayak, the plutonium plant near Chelyabinsk, and took part in the clean-up after its 1957 accident; Kolevatov had worked in a classified atomic laboratory; the group had trained in the East-Urals radioactive trace, the fallout zone of that accident. Kuryakov attributes it to that trace, Buyanov to global fallout. The finding needs neither.	An isotopic measurement of the garments, if they survive in the archive, to distinguish fission products of the Mayak mix from fallout.
The autopsy acts record samples taken for chemical and histological examination; the results are not in the file.	Routine loss, or the classification Ivanov described in 1990 when he wrote that the regional party secretary ordered everything "sealed and handed to the special section". The finding assumes no toxin was present; that assumption is untested.	The sheets themselves, in the archive of the Sverdlovsk bureau of forensic medicine or the FSB regional archive.
The hour at which they left the tent.	Between 21:00 and 23:30, from the examiner's 6 to 8 hours since the last meal for the slope three, the fire's duration, the walking times, and the temperature fall at Burmantovo. Kuryakov's "about 21:00" comes from the wind-chill curve; Gaume and Puzrin's "after midnight" from the watches. None is documented.	Nothing; the file has no clock for that night beyond the digestion estimate, which is written identically for five bodies with stomach contents from traces to 150 cm³.
Procedural oddities: Tempalov's note apparently dated 15 February, before the tent was found; the case has no registration number; the radiological expertise (sheets 370–378) was removed from the file on 10 July 1959 «как не относящиеся к делу», as not relating to the case, and kept in the special sector of the regional prosecutor's office.	A slip of the pen for the date (Kuryakov's reading, plausible and unproven); a case opened at the district level without registration; a classification order of the kind Ivanov described. None bears on the cause of death, and every rival theory needs them as much as this finding does.	The Sverdlovsk regional party archive for 1959, and the original of Tempalov's note.