Kholat Syakhl, 1–2 February 1959

How to read the numbers. The 90 per cent for natural causes is not shared out among the named rivals. Each of those is contradicted by at least one documented fact and is scored below. The residual is for what the file cannot check: the chemical and histological analyses referred to in the autopsy acts are not in the file, and of the nine bodies only one, Zolotaryov's, has been examined since 1959, privately, in 2018. Of the 65 per cent for snow on the tent, 45 points go to a small slab avalanche from the steps above the tent, the mechanism Gaume and Puzrin modelled, and 20 to drifted snow collapsing the roof without any release. The remaining 35 per cent of the trigger splits between a wind event alone, 15, which the standing entrance and the calm tracks argue against, and something not in the record, 20.

The most probable sequence. The sequence below carries the confidences given above. Nine experienced skiers cut their way out through the downhill wall of a tent whose uphill half had come down, left their boots and coats inside, and walked 1.5 km to the forest edge in a close group at a normal pace, in complete darkness, in a rising wind at about −12 °C and falling. Under a cedar they made a fire and cleared a line of sight up the slope. Two of the least dressed died beside it within about two hours. Three set off back for the tent and died on their own track 180 to 230 m short of it, one of them after a fall that cracked his skull. The four best dressed, now wearing the dead men's clothes, dug into a drifted stream bank 75 m from the fire and laid a floor of fir tops; the snow over the stream gave way, three were crushed under it without a mark on the skin, and the fourth froze beside them. The prosecutor Lev Ivanov closed the case on 28 May 1959 with «стихийная сила, преодолеть которую туристы были не в состоянии», an elemental force the hikers were unable to overcome. No later work has displaced that finding. This report adds, as the most probable answers rather than as established facts, what the resolution left unstated: the force was snow, at about 65 per cent, and the crushing injuries happened in the ravine rather than at the tent, at about 75 per cent.

The criminal case file (volume 1, 392 sheets, plus a second volume of copies and correspondence) was read page by page in Russian and checked against the scans. From it 459 facts were extracted, each with its sheet number; the full tables, with the Russian wording and the places where the circulating English translation diverges from it, are published with this report. The facts below are those any explanation must account for. Sheet numbers are to volume 1.

The people cited are the ones who wrote the documents or testified. Vasily Tempalov was the prosecutor of the district town of Ivdel and wrote the first protocols at the tent and the bodies; Lev Ivanov, from the regional prosecutor's office in Sverdlovsk, took over the investigation in March and closed it. Yevgeny Maslennikov, an experienced hiker who had approved the route, led the search on the ground and kept its notebooks. Boris Slobtsov was the student who found the tent; Vladimir Lebedev, Vadim Brusnitsyn, Sergey Sogrin and Georgy Atmanaki were students and hikers in the search parties; Moisey Akselrod was a mountaineer who had hiked with Dyatlov and led one of them; Aleksey Chernyshov was an army captain who joined the search; Kirill Bardin and Yevgeny Shuleshko were sent from Moscow to assess it. Genrietta Churkina was the forensic criminalist who examined the tent. Dryahlyh, Popov and Pashin were local men questioned about the weather.

The tent

The footprints

The cedar and the slope

The ravine

Timeline and weather in the file

Nine autopsies were performed by the Sverdlovsk regional forensic expert Boris Vozrozhdenny: five on 4 and 8 March 1959 (with a second expert, Ivan Laptev, co-signing the four of 4 March) and four on 9 May 1959 in Ivdel. The table gives what each act records, read from the Russian transcription and checked against the scans. Sheet numbers (л.д.) refer to volume 1 of the case file.

Three points in this record bear most on the finding.

The March five froze. All five show the classic markers the examiner used for death by cold: Vishnevsky spots, small haemorrhages in the stomach lining that are a standard marker of death by cold; overfilled bladders, third- and fourth-degree frostbite of fingers and toes. None of the ravine four shows any of them; their hands and feet show only the "bath skin" of three months in water.

The ravine injuries were inflicted in life and required great force without breaking the skin. On 28 May 1959 the investigator questioned the examiner about them. His answers are given below in Russian with a new translation, because the English version in circulation adds a word, "bomb", that he did not use.

Radioactive contamination was found at low levels on three garments only. Only the clothing and tissues of the ravine four were tested (sheets 370–377, by Levashov, the chief radiologist of the city sanitary service, 18–29 May). The activity was beta only, with no alpha or gamma, and it washed off: 30 to 60 per cent came out in three hours of running water. Tissues were at natural potassium-40 levels, indistinguishable from a control body from a Sverdlovsk car crash. On clothing, the expert's own threshold, the sanitary norm for radiation workers of 5,000 disintegrations per minute per 150 cm² before washing, was exceeded by three pieces:

The expert's answer to whether ordinary clothing should carry any such contamination was «Не должно быть совершенно» ("there should be none at all"), and he allowed that after fifteen days in running stream water the original levels "could have been many times greater". He could not identify the nuclide: the laboratory had no radiochemistry or spectrometry. The nine sheets were removed from the file on 10 July 1959 as "not relevant" and returned to the archive only decades later.

Examined since 1959: Zolotaryov, April 2018

One of the nine has been examined since 1959. On 12 April 2018, at the request of Zolotaryov's relatives and with the city's permission, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP) opened the grave under the obelisk inscribed «Семён Золотарёв» at the Ivanovskoye cemetery in Yekaterinburg, outside any criminal procedure; the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation, the Yekaterinburg association of relatives and friends that keeps the group's archive, called it clandestine, and the 2019–20 prosecutors' check neither used it nor ordered its own, its experts holding exhumation "useless" after so long. Sergey Nikitin of the Moscow bureau of forensic medicine examined the skeleton, with the physician Galina Sazonova assisting. The coffin and clothing had rotted away under a fill of stones; the bones and skull were intact. No written expert report has been published. What follows is Nikitin's account on KP's radio programme of 26 April 2018 and his interview with the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets of 28 February 2019.

What the bones settled. The 1959 act is confirmed on the ribs, II to VI on the right along the parasternal and axillary lines, and shown to be incomplete: three fractures of the right scapula (the shoulder blade), inflicted in life, which Nikitin, Sazonova and KP's consultant, the forensic expert Eduard Tumanov, agree are real (the left scapula and far more fragile bones survived the grave intact), were missed because the back was never opened in 1959, so the acts of Dubinina and Thibeaux-Brignolle may under-record as well. The fracture types, the ribs bent inward at the sides and outward at the breastbone, fix the geometry: front-to-back compression of a man lying on his back by a surface wider than his ribcage, slightly right to left. Nikitin and Tumanov both exclude a blast wave, Tumanov also a fall onto a flat hard surface, and both read the load as broad and blunt, "comparable to the surface of the chest".

What they did not settle. Nikitin thought the surface under the body "relatively hard, unlikely snow"; Tumanov answered that the intact spinous processes, the bony points along the spine, argue against a hard surface. The scapula is read as one impact while supine (Nikitin), at least two blows with a narrower object (Tumanov) or two successive blows (Sazonova, "but I am not an expert"); nobody has measured the fractures or converted the pattern into a mass or a fall height. The bones do not show where or when the injuries were sustained. Nikitin said so in 2018, and in 2019 gave Moskovsky Komsomolets his own reconstruction, the four falling into the stream one on another, Dubinina first, Zolotaryov onto her, Kolevatov onto him, Thibeaux striking his head on a stone, and called the version in which the injuries were inflicted in the tent by a slab «неправдоподобной», implausible, because Dubinina and Thibeaux could not have come down the slope. That is an expert's opinion consistent with Vozrozhdenny's mobility statements; it is not an independent measurement. Identity: a photographic superimposition matched 13 of about 24 features; a first mitochondrial test in a private laboratory excluded maternal kinship with the niece; a second, at the Russian Centre of Forensic Medicine under the geneticist Pavel Ivanov in July 2018, gave a 99.66 to 99.84 per cent probability of kinship while noting that mitochondrial DNA cannot separate Semyon from his brother Nikolai. No nuclear test has been reported to September 2026, and no other body has been exhumed.

Bearing on the finding. A broad, sudden, front-to-back load on a supine man is what a snow-loaded tent roof, a collapsing den roof or a fall onto a body in the stream would each produce, so the 2018 examination does not by itself decide between the tent and the ravine. It removes the blast wave, confirms the 1959 act where it can be checked, adds an injury the act missed, and supplies one more expert who places the injuries in the ravine on the same mobility grounds as the 1959 examiner. It does not change the 75 per cent for the ravine, and it is a reason the missing chemistry and the unexhumed bodies of Dubinina and Thibeaux-Brignolle head the list of what would move this finding.

Three quantities in this case have been disputed since 1959 and can be computed from public data: the steepness of the slope at the tent, the darkness of the night, and the temperature. The code is published with this report.

Slope

Two measurements exist, at two scales, and they answer different questions. The public Copernicus GLO-30 elevation model (30 m grid, radar-derived, snow-free) gives the average ground slope at the best-supported tent position, the cairn-marked site three independent Russian researchers agree on (61.7585 N, 59.4294 E, 899 m), as 15 to 16 degrees over windows of 60 to 300 m, with about one degree of random error; the other candidate positions (the point the prosecutors fixed in 2019, 115 m to the north; Borzenkov's GPS reading; the memorial sculpture) give 16 to 19.5 degrees. Directly upslope the ground rises at 17 degrees for the first 100 m and 14 for the next 100 m, and 200 to 300 m up it flattens to a 6-degree shoulder. A 30 m grid smooths away anything shorter than about two grid cells, so a step 4 to 6 m high and 10 to 20 m long, the feature the slab model rests on, is invisible to it whether or not it exists.

The measurement at the scale of the steps is Puzrin and Gaume's own. In September 2021 a drone photogrammetry survey of the slope around the possible tent locations produced a 9 cm terrain model. Their 2022 Comment reports that the average slope along their section is "around 20°" and that "the steps have inclinations exceeding 28 degrees, and many slopes are even steeper than 30 degrees", adding that "these slopes are not just local, they are continuous: no matter where you pitch your tent you are likely to be below one of them". The survey was made on bare ground. In winter, Galina Pigoltsina, the climatologist who modelled the site's weather for the prosecutors in 2019, reports wind transport of 600 to 1,000 m³ per metre of slope, enough, in Puzrin and Gaume's words, to "completely cover local topographic features such as the steps"; the model's mechanism depends on that: a weak layer that formed on the stepped early-winter surface at about 28 degrees and was then buried under a slab whose surface lay at the gentler average angle.

The 1959 witnesses bracket the average. Sergey Sogrin, who climbed to the tent site on 4 March with Moisey Akselrod's search party, testified that "the slope on which the tent stood is not dangerous, the steepness is 15 to 18 degrees" (sheet 334). Vadim Brusnitsyn, a student searcher, gave "approximately 20 to 25 degrees" and "reaches 20 degrees at the tent" (sheets 366, 369). Prosecutor Tempalov's tent-site protocol says 30 degrees, in a sentence that also puts the summit at 300 m when it is 760 m away (sheet 2). The 2019 prosecutors' glaciologist, Viktor Popovnin, measured 21 degrees at the point the geodesists gave him and probed «каменная гряда» under the snow where the tent stood, a stone ridge. The 2021 paper's "about 23 degrees" was the average snow slope estimated from the 1959 photographs, and its 28-degree weak layer an estimate of the step behind the tent; the 2022 survey replaced the estimate with a measurement of the steps and lowered the average to about 20.

What the two measurements settle is limited. On the average slope, the 30 m model agrees with Sogrin, with Borzenkov's 16 to 17 degrees and, within the smoothing of a radar grid and the uncertainty of the tent position, with the drone survey's 20; it is below the 23 degrees of the 2021 paper, which the authors themselves replaced with about 20 degrees in 2022. On the steps, the 30 m model says nothing, and the 9 cm model says they are there, steeper than 28 degrees and continuous across the slope. The coarse average is not evidence against the model's 28-degree layer. What no survey has measured is the snow: whether in the winter of 1958–59 a weak layer lay on such a step above the tent, and which step the tent stood under.

Darkness

The moon was five days from new (new moon 8 February, 00:22 local). Anyone on that slope between about seven in the evening and four in the morning was in complete darkness under cloud, then starlight on snow. Ivanov's estimate that the tent was pitched "at about 17:00" was inferred from the exposure of the last frames on the cameras; since the site was already in mountain shadow from 14:40, those frames could be earlier.

Cold

The nearest weather-station records, from Ivdel, Nyaksimvol and Pechora, 100 to 200 km away, survive in the daily archive of NOAA, the US weather agency. The week before was mild for the season, with daily maxima of minus 4 to minus 7 at Ivdel and Nyaksimvol. On the night of 1 to 2 February a cold front passed: the Ivdel minimum fell from minus 11.2 to minus 20.3, Nyaksimvol from minus 13.9 to minus 30.8, Pechora from minus 23.1 to minus 35.1. A loose sheet in Maslennikov's search notebook copies the readings for that night from Burmantovo, the nearest weather post, in the Lozva valley below the mountains: minus 13 at 21:00, a warm blip to minus 5 at 23:00 as the wind veered west, minus 15 at midnight with a north-west wind, minus 21 under a clear sky at 03:00. Station winds in the lowland were light; the case file's search-organisation report says the pass "usually" has 15 to 20 m/s and up to 36 (sheet 39).

Exposed skin freezes in under 30 minutes below a wind chill of about minus 28 and under 10 minutes below about minus 40. These people were in socks, shirts and one or two sweaters. The cold alone is enough to kill all nine within the night. It does not explain why they left the tent.

Distances

Tent to cedar: 1,551 m horizontal, 256 m of descent, mean gradient 9.4 degrees, bearing 62 degrees. Wind crust for the first 850 m (where the searchers found footprints standing proud as columns), then loose snow one to two metres deep to the forest edge. Walking time without boots in the dark: 35 to 85 minutes. The three bodies on the slope lie within 31 m of the straight line from the fire to the tent, at 323, 503 and 654 m from the fire; Kolmogorova, the farthest, had climbed 72 of the 256 m and still had 184 m of ascent and 900 m of walking left.

Johan Gaume, then at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and Alexander Puzrin, of its sister institute in Zurich (ETH), published their model in January 2021. It answers four objections to the prosecutors' 2020 avalanche verdict: no avalanche signs when the tent was found, a slope too gentle, a release hours after the platform was cut rather than during the digging, and injuries unusual for avalanche victims. Their answer is a small wind slab, a plate of wind-packed snow roughly 5 m by 5 to 9 m and 0.3 to 0.5 m thick, that released from a buried weak layer, a fragile layer of snow crystals on which a slab can slide, inclined at 28 degrees on a local step above the tent, after wind-blown snow accumulating in the lee of the cut had loaded it for 7 to 13.5 hours; it slid 1 to 2 m onto the uphill half of the tent and crushed the sleepers against the ski-reinforced floor.

The equations in the paper's Methods were reimplemented for this page (the authors' code on Zenodo could not be downloaded), and they reproduce every published number to the quoted precision: wind-snow height 0.24 and 0.44 m, delay 7.2 and 13.5 hours, tension crack 4.95 m, slab width 8.8 m. The model is internally sound. The table below lists its inputs and what the record says about each.

What the replication shows

With the paper's own snow parameters, the delayed-release behaviour exists only in a band two to three degrees wide around the assumed angle. The release window is 24.7 to 29.7 degrees; the 9.5-to-13.5-hour window is hit at 26 to 28.5 degrees. At 22 or 23 degrees the slab never releases, however much snow the wind adds. At 25 degrees it releases only if the wind snow never bonds, and then after more than 150 hours. At 30 degrees it fails while the platform is being dug. The regime is sensitive to small changes in the parameters: cohesion of 300 Pa gives failure at the cut, 440 Pa the published delay, 450 Pa no release; 5 cm of slab thickness, one degree of slope or friction, or 30 kg/m³ of density flips the regime. Once in the delayed regime, the time to release is proportional to the deposition rate, which nothing measured constrains. The journal's reviewer made the same point: Dieter Issler, an avalanche scientist who reviewed the paper for the journal, wrote that the agreement between the computed and forensic delays was "coincidental", and the authors' revision "no longer claims that they have reproduced the delay" but back-calculates the deposition rate from it.

Impact. A simple spring-and-damper model of the chest, calibrated as in the paper, gives 20 to 70 per cent chest compression for 50 to 200 kg blocks at 2 m/s on a person lying against a firm floor; the paper's 28 to 34 per cent falls inside that. Contact pressures are 25 to 50 kPa (kilopascals; the atmosphere presses at about 100), two to three orders of magnitude below what breaks skin. So "multiple rib fractures with no external wound" is what a broad, heavy, slow load does, and it is equally what a collapsing snow roof, or three to four metres of static snow, does to someone lying on a stream bed. The injury physics cannot tell the tent from the ravine.

The skull. The one injury the chest physics does not cover is Thibeaux-Brignolle's: a depressed fracture over 9 by 7 cm of the right temporo-parietal bone, with a piece 3 by 3.5 cm driven onto the dura (л.д. 353). Fractures of that region in cadaver tests need 2.5 to 10 kN (kilonewtons; one kilonewton is roughly the weight of 100 kg), mean 5.2, delivered through a flat 5 by 10 cm plate or a 2.5 cm disc (the 1991 tests of D. L. Allsop and colleagues; a 2004 review by N. Yoganandan and F. A. Pintar gives 5.6 to 9.9). A block of snow can transmit no more force than its crushing pressure times the area it bears on. Over the whole 63 cm² of the depression the 2.5 kN floor needs 400 kPa and the 5.2 kN mean 800; over the 50 cm² test plate, 500 kPa; over the 10.5 cm² bone piece alone, 2.4 MPa, a pressure reached by ice or rock and by no snow. Where the crushing pressure of the snow on that slope lies is the open question. Gaume and Puzrin's own impact simulation gives the wind slab a yield pressure of 100 kPa and the older snow 30 kPa, hardening as it compacts (their Methods, Eq. 48); at 100 kPa a slab face bearing on the entire depression delivers 0.6 kN, a factor of four short. Malcolm Mellor's 1975 review of snow mechanics, compiling tests of dry, coherent snow under rapid laboratory loading reads, from his Fig. 17, as about 300 to 700 kPa at 0.40 g/cm³ and 500 to 950 at 0.46, the densities measured at the site; the same figure puts tensile strength at 0.40 near 190 kPa, twenty to thirty times the 6 to 10 kPa the paper assigns its slab, so a young natural slab sits at or below the bottom of that band. Pairing the hardest of those figures, 300 kPa, with a 100 cm² contact larger than the fracture gives 3 kN, which overlaps the threshold: the numbers do not exclude snow. What the arithmetic supports is narrower: a soft or medium slab cannot have made this fracture by itself; snow could have made it only as a hard, well-sintered slab or crust bearing on most of the depression with the head backed by something firm, or through a hard object between the snow and the temple. The examiner's own description, a deep multi-fragment depression with one piece driven in, reads as a concentrated load, which is why Evgeny Buyanov, the engineer whose 2011 book puts the injuries at the tent, puts a camera under his head, why the paper's supplement adopts that reading ("high concentrated force"), and why this finding names a stone or an ice edge in the stream bed. That is an interpretation rather than a measurement: the piece of temporal bone taken at autopsy for study (л.д. 354) was never reported on, and nobody has examined the margins since. The constraint holds equally in the tent and in the ravine, and it does not change any of the percentages. Arithmetic: code/physics/skull_constraint.py.

The follow-up evidence. Puzrin and Gaume returned in March and September 2021 and January 2022, and reported in a 2022 Comment: a 9 cm drone model showing "an average slope of about 20 degrees" with metre-scale steps over 30; two slab avalanches on an eastern slope less than 3 km from the tent on 29 January 2022, the smaller one "practically invisible after less than an hour" under wind-transported snow; independent expert work for the prosecutors (Popovnin's 2019 snow measurements, Pigoltsina's computed 9 to 12 m/s wind and more than 150 cm of snow above the tent) consistent with their assumptions. A further slab was photographed by Dmitriy Borisov, a hiker who visits the pass, about 700 m from the tent on Kholat Syakhl itself on 7 January 2023. These observations settle three things: that steps steeper than 28 degrees exist above every candidate tent position, so the model's terrain requirement is met at the scale of the steps; that slab avalanches occur in the area; and that small ones vanish within an hour. They do not show the snow requirement, a weak layer lying on such a step in February 1959, and the avalanches observed were on a different slope under different conditions, as the authors say: the slab there "was softer, the slope was steeper, it was not undercut from below and the trigger was probably different".

The counter-case, and what survives of it

The strongest opponents are people who have examined the slope and its snow in winter. Vladimir Borzenkov, an aviation engineer with six winter expeditions between 2012 and 2019, measured the snow surface at 16 to 17 degrees along its whole length with about 20 degrees in the last 5 m under the shoulder, snow density 458 kg/m³, depth 0.8 m at the tent rising to 2.2 to 2.5 m twenty metres upslope, hard crust throughout, and in four winters of pits found no weak layer and no depth hoar; a shear test in March 2019 gave a strength more than ten times the driving stress. Vladislav Karelin, a 1959 searcher, showed that the prosecutors' trace-evidence expert in 2020 reversed cause and effect on the tent poles, and that the entrance pole stood with its guy lines intact while the poles for the rear guys were still in place. Sergey Sogrin, also a searcher, testified in 1959 that the slope was 15 to 18 degrees and later that he looked specifically for depth hoar under the crust and found none.

Scored against the replication: Borzenkov's density, depth profile and wind climatology survive as measurements, and the last two argue against the model rather than for a bigger avalanche, since denser snow and stronger wind shorten the modelled delay to minutes. His 16 to 17 degrees is the winter snow surface, which is the smoothed average and does not speak to the ground steps beneath it. His pits show that in four recent winters the snowpack was nowhere near failure; they cannot show what it was in 1959. His claim that a slab would have left debris does not hold: a 12 to 20 m³ slab stopping on the flat platform leaves 0.3 to 0.5 m that 25 days of wind reworks, and the 2022 observation of a trace erased within an hour is direct. Karelin's point about the poles is correct as mechanics but does not discriminate: a half-collapsed tent with the far guys torn is what either a small slab or a 20 to 25 m/s gust leaves. The objection that the footprints start 15 to 40 m below the tent does not discriminate either; hard crust records no prints at the tent, with or without a slab.

The decisive question is therefore not the slope, which the drone survey has answered in the model's favour, but the snow: whether a buried weak layer lay on one of those steps for about 5 to 7 m above the cut in early February 1959. The winter observations at the site point in different directions. Popovnin, measuring for the prosecutors in March 2019, found snow properties consistent with the model's assumptions and a stone ridge under the tent site, and still told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the version needed «чёткие доказательства. Не аргументы, а доказательства», clear proofs, not arguments, and had none. Borzenkov, from pits cut to the ground in 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2019, the first by an expedition he briefed but did not join, found strong bonding between every layer, no depth hoar, stones protruding 10 to 40 cm from the ground under the pack, and in a March 2019 shear test on the visually weakest deep layer a strength more than ten times the driving stress; Sogrin recalls cutting sections in 1959 and finding none. None of these was a pit line up the step above the fixed 1959 position, so none settles it. On the steps themselves the two sides' figures are close: Borzenkov concedes steps of 28 to 30 degrees but puts them at no more than 5 to 6 m long, while the paper's 4-to-6 m height implies 8 to 12 m of slope length; the modelled slab is 5 m long and its stressed zone 7 m, so on his figures the terrain is marginal and on theirs ample. The paper's mechanism is possible on this slope. Whether it occurred at the tent on 1 February 1959 depends on the snowpack, which was not measured; on the delay, which is fitted rather than predicted; and on the injuries, which cannot be placed.

Two points follow from this. The positive case for the slab, terrain met and slabs seen nearby, does not place the crushing injuries at the tent: the model's own impact calculation is satisfied as well by a collapse in the ravine. And the objections to the slab, the unmeasured weak layer and the fitted delay, do not place them in the ravine: if the slab is wrong the injuries still need a cause, and the ravine collapse is argued from the examiner's statements on mobility and survival time (л.д. 381–383) and from Nikitin's 2019 reading of the bones; the slab's failure plays no part in it. The 75 per cent for the ravine depends on those statements.

Twenty-eight documented facts, each with its source, are scored below against the eight published explanations and against this finding. The eight are: A, the delayed wind slab of Gaume and Puzrin (2021); B, the prosecutors' review of 2019–20, which ended with a slab at about 21:00 and a collapse of the ravine bank; C, the version of Evgeny Buyanov, a St Petersburg engineer and mountaineer (2011), a snow slab at the tent that crushed three of them there; D, a katabatic wind, a violent fall wind off the mountain, proposed by the Swedish archaeologist Richard Holmgren (2019); E, infrasound, low-frequency sound off the summit inducing panic, from the American writer Donnie Eichar's 2013 book Dead Mountain; F, a military test, rocket or toxic release; G, an attack by Mansi hunters or a sacred-mountain retribution; H, a KGB operation or a criminal attack, from the pseudonymous Russian author Alexei Rakitin (2013). A green cell means the explanation requires or accounts for the fact; grey means it does not address it; amber means it accounts for the fact only by assumption, or leaves it unmodelled; red means the fact contradicts it, with the reason given under the table. The three slab versions are kept apart because they put the fatal injuries in different places.

Columns: A Gaume–Puzrin 2021: delayed wind slab at the tent; B Prosecutors' check 2020: slab at ~21:00, ravine bank collapse; C Buyanov 2011: snow board at the tent, the three crushed there; D Katabatic wind, Holmgren 2019; E Infrasound, Eichar 2013; F Military, rocket or toxic release; G Mansi attack or sacred-mountain retribution; H KGB or criminal, Rakitin 2013; V This finding: snow on the tent, cold, ravine collapse.

Why the red cells are red

• Standing tent against the fall wind (2·D). Holmgren's mechanism requires a wind that "would have blown away or into pieces" any tent. The tent stood on its skis with the entrance pole and most guy lines intact, and spare skis and poles stood upright beside it (sheets 298–299, 214, 365).
• Calm tracks against wind and panic (5·D, 5·E). Tempalov: «люди шли нормальным шагом», the people walked at a normal pace (312). Chernyshov: the wind "did not roll them over the snow", or no tracks would have remained (91). Atmanaki: "with any wind you can stay on the slope and go back" (215). Slobodin died with his cap still on his head (316–329). Infrasound panic predicts scattered flight; the file shows a line of people walking together and then hours of organised work at the cedar and in the ravine (341–343).
• No strangers' tracks (7·G, 7·H). On a slope where sock prints stood up for three weeks, no track of any other person or animal but one dog was found by the searchers or by their Mansi guides (386–387, 91, 71, 177).
• Injuries without skin damage (14·C, 14·E, 14·G, 14·H). Buyanov puts the crushing injuries at the tent, 1.5 km from the bodies, but the examiner stated that Thibeaux-Brignolle could only have been carried, would have been unconscious, and that Dubinina died 10 to 20 minutes after her injury (382–383). Falls in a panic do not give symmetric bilateral rib fractures on two lines. Asked whether Thibeaux could have been struck with a stone held in a hand, Vozrozhdenny answered «В этом случае были бы повреждены мягкие ткани, а этого не обнаружено», in that case the soft tissues would have been damaged, and this was not found (382).
• No launch (20·F). A rocket or weapon on the night of 1–2 February needs a launch that does not exist in the record. The General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects, the launch list kept by the astronomer Jonathan McDowell, has for 1959 only short-range and sounding shots at the Kapustin Yar test range on the Volga on 29–30 January and 2 February, 1,700 km away; the fireballs the file does contain match the test flights of the R-7, the Soviet intercontinental missile that had launched Sputnik, on 17 February at 01:46 UTC and 30 March at 22:53 UTC to the minute.
• Nothing taken (21·H). Killers who had come for a contaminated "sample", for photographs or for the cameras left all of them behind with the money and documents: «наличие всех ценностей группы» (387).
• The 2018 bones (28·E, 28·F, 28·G, 28·H). Infrasound supplies no mass. The blast-wave sub-variant of the military theory is excluded by the fracture types (flexion laterally, extension at the sternum), which are those of compression rather than of a pressure wave; the toxic sub-variant is untouched, hence amber. A beating with a narrow object is contradicted on the ribs by a contact surface wider than the ribcage; the scapula, on which the three readings differ, does not support it.
• The Mansi record (26·G). The only Mansi in the area, the Anyamov family, hunting on the Auspiya river, saw only ski tracks (230–231, 261–262); Stepan Kurikov, a Mansi who guided the searchers: the sacred place is in the upper Vizhay, unguarded and open to Russians (232); the Mansi searched with the Russians (262, 300).

Amber cells: the flashlight on top of the snow (3·A–C, V) is consistent with a slab but shows very little net deposition at the tent in 25 days, a difficulty for the heavy wind transport the model needs; the missing debris (4·A–C, V) is explained by wind reworking, which the 2022 observation of a trace erased within an hour makes plausible but cannot confirm for 1959; the den layout (13·V) has never been modelled by anyone; the ravine injuries under A are produced at the tent but the authors "do not insist" on that place, under D the collapsing bivouac is asserted without any force calculation, and under this finding the rib fractures are accounted for but the skull fracture needs a hard object whose position is unknown; the nuclear sub-variant of F is contradicted by clean organs and clean books; Rakitin's key prediction, photographs of the strangers on Zolotaryov's camera, is untestable because that film is ruined.

The rivals, one by one

The prosecutors' check of 2019–20. It was a supervisory check rather than a criminal investigation, run inside the Sverdlovsk regional prosecutor's office from September 2018 by Andrei Kuryakov, a department head there, on the application of one relative. Its expeditions in March 2019 fixed the tent site by comparing 1959 and 2019 photographs, measured the slope there at 21 degrees against the 30 written in the 1959 protocol, and commissioned a microclimate reconstruction (north-west wind of 8 m/s gusting to 30, wind chill −30 at 21:00 falling to −46 by 03:00) and eight other expert reports. On 11 July 2020 Kuryakov announced that a small slab forced the group out at about 21:00, that they walked 50 m to a stone ridge, could not see the tent in a visibility of 6 to 16 m, went down to the forest and froze, and that the four in the ravine were crushed when the snow bank they had undercut collapsed. That location of the injuries is the part of his account this finding adopts; his slope, his timing and his 50 m stand in the blizzard are not needed by it and are contested. On 10 August 2020 the Prosecutor General issued him a formal warning of incomplete official compliance, the last step before dismissal, for acting "outside his official duties and without instruction from management, for personal purposes connected with preparing his dissertation"; he left the service in October 2020. The written conclusions were never published, most relatives were refused access to them, and no court has ever ruled on them. The resolution of 28 May 1959 remains the only decision with legal force.

Gaume and Puzrin 2021. The model is tested in full above. It replaces the prosecutors' undated "slab" with a mechanism and a clock, and its follow-up field work established that the steps above the candidate tent positions are steeper than 28 degrees and that small slabs occur nearby and vanish within an hour. Whether a weak layer lay on the step in the 1959 snow is unmeasured, its delay is fitted, and its injury simulation does not distinguish the tent from the ravine. It is the leading single candidate for the trigger, at 45 per cent.

Buyanov 2011. Evgeny Buyanov's version is the same wind slab with the three crushed on the downhill edge of the tent and an organised retreat carrying them. It is the only slab version that accounts for the tracks starting in two groups, and it is contradicted by the examiner's mobility findings, which it dismisses as "urban experience". A 1.5 km night walk carrying a man with a crushed skull and two people with crushed chests, one of whom had minutes to live, is the reason this finding puts the injuries in the ravine.

Katabatic wind, Holmgren 2019. Holmgren's version is built on the Anaris accident in the Swedish mountains in February 1978, in which a fall wind of 25 m/s killed eight of nine skiers who had their sleeping bags in their packs. It is a real mechanism for abandoning shelter and is compatible with the hypothermia sequence. It is contradicted by the tent, which was still standing, and by the tracks, which show people walking at a normal pace. Kholat Syakhl is a rounded dome without the plateau that pools cold air. It survives as the wind-only trigger inside the 35 per cent of the trigger not assigned to snow.

Infrasound, Eichar 2013. Eichar proposes that a vortex street off the summit produced panic. It predicts nothing that can be checked in the file, is contradicted by the orderly tracks and the hours of rational work that followed, supplies no force for the ravine injuries, and has no documented human victim anywhere.

Military, rocket, fireballs. Every first-hand light sighting in the file is dated 17 February or 31 March and matches an R-7 launch from Tyuratam, the range in Kazakhstan later known as Baikonur. Nothing reached the northern Urals on 1–2 February. No debris, crater, scorch or blast damage was found in three months on the slope, in the forest or in the Lozva valley; the tent was cut from inside; the radiation is three washable beta spots on cloth at one to two times the sanitary norm for radiation workers, with organs at the natural potassium-40 level and the group's books clean; Kolevatov was uninjured and six people spent hours making fire and shelter. The only variant not contradicted is a non-lethal toxic exposure that merely frightened them, and it survives only because the 1959 chemical analyses are missing from the file. That is a gap in the file, and it is the largest single item in the 10 per cent residual.

Mansi. This was the 1959 investigation's first working version, which is why the file holds a block of Mansi interrogations. Against it stand the alibis, the Mansi's own knowledge of every household within 100 km, the fact that nothing was stolen, the absence of weapon or beating injuries, a sacred place that is elsewhere and open to Russians, and the Mansi guides in the search party. The closing resolution of May 1959 rejected it; the "nine Mansi who once died on the mountain" appear in no 1959 testimony.

Rakitin's KGB "controlled delivery". Rakitin has three members of the group as operatives carrying contaminated clothing to foreign agents, who detected the trap and killed the group with blows that leave no marks. The version is internally coherent but supported by no document, and it is contradicted by the absence of strangers' tracks, by the examiner's statement that blows would have damaged the soft tissue, and by the "sample" being left on the bodies.

The minor theories. Each is contradicted by a single sheet of the file: carbon monoxide on the stove packed in its case with the pipes inside (314); a fight on the absence of any signs of struggle and on the shared work afterwards (386, 341–343); alcohol or methanol on «наличие алкоголя не обнаружено» in every March autopsy (103, 111, 119, 125, 132); the Yeti on the absence of any animal track and any bite or claw injury (91, 177); paradoxical undressing, the stripping off of clothes by people dying of cold, as a cause on the fact that they were already undressed when they left and that the least dressed had their clothes cut off after death by the others (386); ball lightning on the absence of electrical marks; a fall into the stream on the intact flooring with clothes laid on it 6 m from the bodies and on the examiner's "great force" (341–343, 382).

Where the case stands in September 2026. Yuri Kuntsevich, who led the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation, died in August 2021. On 2 June 2026 the relatives' counsel Evgeny Chernousov announced that they would seek a new criminal case under the murder article, on the ground that the nine autopsy acts lack the mandatory chemical and histological examinations, to be followed by exhumation of all nine bodies. The next day Evgeny Buyanov restated the slab-at-the-tent version. Neither Russia's Investigative Committee nor the prosecutor's office had answered by the date of this report. The two things the relatives ask for, the missing analyses and the exhumation, are also two of the measurements that would move this finding.

Times are local (UTC+5) and are estimates unless a document fixes them. Each step carries the confidence that it happened as stated, given everything above.

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.

These are the measurements and documents that would move the numbers in the finding, with the direction they would move them.

1. A winter snow profile at the tent site. A pit line through a 1959-like snowpack at the fixed 1959 position, extending 10 m upslope of the cut. A buried weak layer under a 0.3 to 0.5 m wind slab on the step above the cut would raise the slab from 45 to about 65 per cent and the snow trigger to about 80. Repeated pits showing hard, homogeneous, well-bonded snow to the ground on the step, which is what Borzenkov reports for pits cut in 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2019, would push the slab toward 20 per cent. Nobody has dug a pit line up the step above the fixed 1959 position with this question in mind.
2. The 1959 tent position on the 2021 drone model. The prosecutors fixed the site by photogrammetry in 2019; Puzrin and Gaume's September 2021 survey gives a 9 cm ground model on which steps above 28 degrees run continuously across the slope. Overlaying the two would name the step that lay above the cut, with its angle and length, which is what the model's slab size and release delay are computed from. The 30 m public model used here cannot see steps and does not bear on them.
3. The missing chemical and histological sheets of the 1959 autopsies. A toxin or a propellant metabolite in the tissues would cut the natural-cause figure sharply and revive the military version. Clean results would close the largest item in the residual.
4. Exhumation of Dubinina and Thibeaux-Brignolle with modern imaging, which the relatives' June 2026 demand would bring about for all nine. Zolotaryov's private exhumation of 2018 is the precedent: it confirmed the 1959 rib findings, added three scapula fractures the act had missed and excluded a blast wave, but it could not place or date the injuries. Broad compression fractures with no localised blows on the other two would confirm the ravine; fracture geometry or soft-tissue evidence of blows or a weapon would overturn the finding outright. Tumanov's "different lines" claim about the ribs is tested by the same examination.
5. A range or telemetry record for 1 to 2 February 1959 from Kapustin Yar, Tyuratam or the air-defence forces of any launch whose trajectory passed over 61.8° N, 59.4° E. The published launch lists contain none; an archival record would revive the rocket version and would need to be reconciled with the absence of debris and blast damage.
6. The hourly synoptic record of 1 to 2 February 1959 at Burmantovo, Ivdel and Nyaksimvol from the archive of Roshydromet, the Russian weather service. A recorded fall-wind event, a sudden onset to 25 m/s or more at the time the tent was abandoned, would raise the wind-only trigger above the snow trigger; a steady 8 to 15 m/s would lower it.
7. The written conclusions and the nine expert reports of the 2019–20 check, held in the Sverdlovsk state archive with restricted access. The microclimate and snow reports were never published; their raw numbers would replace the reconstructed weather used here.
8. The original 26 to 28 February 1959 negatives of the tent, the slope above it and the flashlight, at full resolution. A crown line, a debris lobe or a clean surface above the tent would each settle the debris question in one direction.
9. A dynamic model of the ravine bank collapse. The finding uses a static and quasi-static calculation to show that 2 to 4 m of drifted snow on a person against a stream bed gives the observed chest compression. A material-point simulation of the actual bank geometry, of the kind Gaume and Puzrin ran for the tent, could show that the collapse cannot deliver the load, which would send the injuries back to the tent and to Buyanov's version.

What this adds

None of this is new primary evidence. Each item is a new analysis of evidence already in print: the 1959 file, public elevation, astronomical and launch data, the published model with its peer-review file, and the 2018 exhumation reports. A conclusion that the analysis supports, and that historians find plausible, does not validate the computation that reached it; the code and inputs are saved so that each computation can be checked on its own terms.

1. A check of the average slope at every published candidate for the tent position from the public 30 m Copernicus elevation model: 15 to 16 degrees at the site, no candidate above 19.5. It bounds the average, which the 2021 paper put at 23 ± 2 degrees and the 2022 follow-up at about 20, and it says nothing about the 4-to-6 m steps the model rests on, which the authors' 9 cm drone survey shows.
2. A from-scratch reimplementation of the Gaume–Puzrin release model with a sensitivity and regime map. The delayed release exists only between 24.7 and 29.7 degrees; the forensic window is met only at 26 to 28.5; cohesion of 300, 440 and 450 Pa gives failure at the cut, the published delay and no release; and the time to release is proportional to a deposition rate that nothing measured constrains. Dieter Issler's review called the agreement coincidental, and the regime map supports that judgement.
3. Injury physics that makes the examiner's statements quantitative. Any 100 to 300 kg of hard snow at 1 to 2 m/s, or 3 to 4 m of static snow on a person against a firm base, gives the rib pattern without breaking skin, so the tent and the ravine cannot be told apart by the chest injuries. For the temporal fracture, the 2.5 to 10 kN of the cadaver tests over the 63 cm² of the depression needs a crushing pressure of 400 kPa or more, which excludes a soft or medium slab as the sole loader but not a hard one, nor a hard object under the snow.
4. The fact-by-fact scoring of 28 documented facts against nine explanations, with the contradicting sheet named in each red cell, and the three slab versions kept separate because they put the injuries in different places.
5. The darkness and the clock. The moon was below the horizon from 11:27 on 1 February to 04:15 on 2 February; full night from 19:40; the tent site in mountain shadow from 14:40. Walking times of 35 to 85 minutes to the cedar, wind chill on the slope of −22 to −29, and the Burmantovo readings falling from −8 to −21 °C between 15:00 and 03:00 give the reconstruction its times.
6. The fireballs closed with the launch list. Buyanov and the space historian Aleksandr Zheleznyakov matched the 17 February sighting to an R-7 launch in 2007; the GCAT launch list confirms it to the minute, matches the 31 March sighting to the R-7 failure at 22:53 UTC on 30 March, and shows nothing capable of reaching the northern Urals on 1 or 2 February.
7. A catalogue of 41 places where the standard English transcription differs from the Russian on load-bearing points, among them the "bomb" in Vozrozhdenny's testimony, which in Russian is «воздушной взрывной волне», an air blast wave, with no bomb; "in the first hour" for «в первые часы», the first hours, in Slobodin's act; and the knuckle abrasions rendered as the wrist. English-language discussion of the case rests on those translations.
8. The legal status of the 2020 conclusions: disowned by the Prosecutor General on 10 August 2020, never published, never ruled on by any court, with the 28 May 1959 resolution still the only operative decision, and the relatives' 2 June 2026 demand for a new case unanswered at the date of this report.

What agrees with earlier work

The finding rests mainly on Ivanov's 1959 resolution that a natural force killed the group and on Vozrozhdenny's statements on mechanism and survival. Sogrin's 15 to 18 degrees and Borzenkov's 16 to 17 are what the elevation model gives. The location of the injuries in the ravine is Kuryakov's and Nikitin's. The 17 February R-7 identification is Buyanov's. The observation that small slabs on these slopes vanish within an hour is Puzrin and Gaume's own field result, and it is the reason the missing debris does not rule out every slab version. Issler's point about the fitted delay was made in peer review in 2020. The drone survey's finding that steps steeper than 28 degrees run above every candidate tent position is taken from Puzrin and Gaume's 2022 Comment and was not independently checked. Nikitin's 2018 reading of Zolotaryov's chest as compression by "a large heavy mass, most likely snow", and his 2019 placement of the injuries in the ravine, are taken as expert opinion consistent with the 1959 examiner rather than as new measurement.

Where this falls short

• No field measurement was made for this report. Every snow observation at the site is other people's, made in 1959, between 2010 and 2019, and between 2021 and 2023, and none was taken at the fixed 1959 position with a pit line above the cut.
• The model paper's Zenodo code, the journal originals and the cadaver-test primaries (Kroell 1974, Lobdell) were not directly reachable; the replication used the published Methods, the peer-review file and mirrors. The reproduction of every published number gives confidence that the equations are right; the thorax calibration point could not be checked against the original data.
• Only volume 1 of the case file and the published radiograms were read. Volume 2, the unpublished 2020 expert reports and the original negatives were not.
• The ravine collapse, the least secure step of the reconstruction, is treated by static and quasi-static calculation only. Nobody has run a dynamic model of it, and this report has not either.
• The weather for the night is reconstructed from three daily stations 100 to 200 km away, Maslennikov's notes of the Burmantovo readings and the 2020 microclimate expertise as reported in the press; no hourly 1959 record for the site was obtained.
• Tumanov's claim that the rib fractures run on different lines was not checked against the autopsy drawings, and the objections attributed in some accounts to Kolmogorova's brother could not be found in any Russian source.
• The hour of leaving the tent is inferred within a 2.5-hour window from a digestion estimate written identically for five bodies.

Primary documents

Criminal case «О гибели туристов в районе горы Отортен», volume 1, 1959, cited by sheet («л.д.»). Scans and transcriptions at dyatlovpass.com, English at dyatlovpass.com/case-files-N?rbid=17743, Russian at dyatlovpass.com/case-files-N-ru?rbid=17747, where N is the sheet range. Where wording matters this report quotes the Russian and gives its own translation; the English transcription was checked against the Russian on every load-bearing sentence, and the differences are catalogued in the forensic conflicts file below.

• Scene: the protocol of the site (2–7) and Tempalov's interrogation (310–313); the labaz protocol (8–10); the items protocol (11–20); the diaries (21–28); Maslennikov (62–75); Chernyshov (91); the search radiograms (among them 149–153, 177, 191); Atmanaki (209–220); Lebedev (314–315); Akselrod (316–329); Slobtsov (298–300); Brusnitsyn (365); Churkina's tent expertise (303–304); the ravine protocol (341–343); the fireball clipping and testimonies (344, 264–267, 290–292, 378–380); Ivanov's resolution of 28 May 1959 (384–387).
• Forensic: autopsy acts of Slobodin (95–103), Doroshenko (104–111), Krivonischenko (112–119), Dyatlov (120–126), Kolmogorova (127–134), Kolevatov (345–348), Zolotaryov (349–351), Thibeaux-Brignolle (352–354), Dubinina (355–357); Levashov's radiological expertise (371–377); Vozrozhdenny's interrogation (381–383).
• Mansi interrogations (82–87, 223–232, 261–262).
• Maslennikov's two search notebooks with the Burmantovo readings of 1 February 1959, read on the scans at dyatlovpass.com.

Scholarship, reports and the counter-case

• J. Gaume and A. M. Puzrin, "Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959", Communications Earth & Environment 2:10, 28 January 2021, doi 10.1038/s43247-020-00081-8, with its Supplementary Information and the peer-review file (reviewer Dieter Issler); A. M. Puzrin and J. Gaume, "Post-publication careers: follow-up expeditions reveal avalanches at Dyatlov Pass", Comment, Communications Earth & Environment 3:63, 2022, doi 10.1038/s43247-022-00393-x (read in full, PDF); their interview of 28 March 2022 at dyatlovpass.com/puzrin-gaume; the 7 January 2023 slab at dyatlovpass.com/avalanche-2023.
• Skull-fracture tolerance and snow strength, for the constraint on Thibeaux-Brignolle's fracture: D. L. Allsop, T. R. Perl and C. Y. Warner, "Force/deflection and fracture characteristics of the temporo-parietal region of the human head", SAE 912907, 1991 (2.5 to 10 kN, mean 5.2, flat 5 by 10 cm plate and 2.54 cm disc); N. Yoganandan and F. A. Pintar, "Biomechanics of temporo-parietal skull fracture", Clinical Biomechanics 19:225–239, 2004 (5.6 to 9.9 kN); M. Mellor, "A review of basic snow mechanics", IAHS Publication 114:251–291, 1975, Fig. 17 on p. 277, read from the plot (PDF saved as data/mellor-1975-snow-mechanics.pdf, with the figure as a PNG); the yield pressures of 30 and 100 kPa and the hardening law are Eq. 47–48 and the parameter list in the Methods of the 2021 paper. Arithmetic in code/physics/skull_constraint.py, output in skull_constraint_results.txt.
• The 2019–20 check: RIA Novosti, Interfax, Kommersant, KP, Vesti and Lenta reports of 11 July 2020; Kommersant on the formal warning of 10 August 2020 and the dismissal reported on 2 November 2020; Lenta of 2 February 2024; Izvestia, Fontanka, VZ and URA of 2–3 June 2026.
• E. Buyanov and B. Slobtsov, «Тайна гибели группы Дятлова», Yekaterinburg 2011; A. Rakitin, «Перевал Дятлова…», Yekaterinburg 2013 and murders.ru; R. Holmgren, "Dyatlov expedition – new theory", ARCDOC 2019; D. Eichar, Dead Mountain, Chronicle Books 2013; L. Ivanov, «Тайна огненных шаров», 1990.
• V. Borzenkov's 2022 rebuttal and V. Karelin's "the avalanche is a myth", both at dyatlovpass.com; S. Sogrin's 1959 testimony and 2021 interview; V. Louhi, E. Dmitrievskaya, O. Litvinova and V. Ankudinov, «Перевал Дятлова. А была ли лавина?»; the Investigative Committee's letter of 31 August 2018.
• The 2018 exhumation of Zolotaryov: Komsomolskaya Pravda reports of 13 and 26 April (Nikitin's radio transcript), 17 May, 5 June (Tumanov) and 16 July 2018 (the Russian Centre of Forensic Medicine DNA result); Moskovsky Komsomolets, 28 February 2019 (Nikitin's interview); Sazonova's forum posts of May 2018; RIA and TASS of 1 October 2019; Interfax of 22 July 2020. Research note research/zolotaryov-exhumation-2018.md with 52 saved pages in data/exhumation-2018/.
• J. McDowell, General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects, launch list, planet4589.org, accessed 14 September 2026.

Data and code

• Copernicus DEM GLO-30, tile N61_00_E059_00 (AWS public bucket); NOAA GHCN-Daily for Ivdel (RSM00023921), Nyaksimvol (RSM00023724), Troitsko-Pechorsk, Cherdyn and Pechora, 1959; PyEphem 4.2.1 for sun and moon; the JAG/TI wind-chill formula.
• Slope, profile, darkness, weather and walking-time scripts in code/geo/ (run_all.sh reproduces every figure and table); the slab release, impact, burial and hypothermia models in code/physics/ (gp_model.py, slab_release.py, slab_impact.py, hypothermia.py, with results files and figures).

Files published with this report

This report and its figures; research/case-file-scene-facts.md (246 facts) and case-file-scene-conflicts.md; research/case-file-forensic-facts.md (213 facts) and case-file-forensic-conflicts.md (41 translation differences, 16 internal contradictions, 16 gaps); research/geo-timeline-weather.md; research/physics-assessment.md; research/rival-theories.md with the full matrix and its reasons; research/reinvestigation-2019-2020.md; and data/ with the saved sources and the Burmantovo readings.

Times are local Sverdlovsk time (UTC+5). The confidence figures are judgements about the weighted facts.