Buckle up, everyone, this story is *wild*.

The 62-year-old Dyatlov Pass mystery, in which nine students died at the hands of an unknown force, has likely been solved thanks to the movie Frozen and gruesome car crash experiments.

Me, for @NatGeo + thread!

In what has become known as the Dyatlov Pass incident, ten members of the Urals Polytechnic Institute in Yekaterinburg—nine students and one sports instructor who fought in World War II—headed into the frigid wilderness on a skiing expedition on January 23, 1959. 1/x

One student turned back after experiencing joint pain.

He never saw his friends again.

2/x

The team made camp on February 1, pitching a large tent on the snowy slopes of Kholat Saykhl, whose name can be interpreted as “Dead Mountain” in the language of the region’s Indigenous Mansi people. Ominous, sure - but these were experienced mountain hikers. 3/x

The nine were never heard from again.

When a search team arrived at Kholat Saykhl a few weeks later, the tent was found just barely sticking out of the snow, and it appeared cut open from the inside. The next day, the first of the bodies was found near a cedar tree. 4/x

Good morning America! You all seem thrilled about Biden’s moon rock. Its symbolism, of the scientific and exploratory achievements that have been made – and will ideally soon be surpassed – certainly hits home.

What you might not know is that rock has an *epic* backstory. 1/x

This rock is known as Lunar Sample 76015,143 - an unromantic name for one of the geologic treasures brought back from the Moon during the Apollo era. This was scooped up by the Apollo 17 astronauts, including Harrison Schmitt, the only professional geologist sent to the moon. 2/x

But that’s not where our story begins. The rock's sage starts 4.5 billion years earlier.

I don’t know if you know this, but you should: the Moon is a hole-punched volcanic crypt, a place sculpted by huge impacts and strange, epic effusions of lava. 3/x

We don’t know how the Moon formed. But the leading theory, partly because it’s the simplest, is that a Mars-sized protoplanet slammed into a magma ocean-covered baby Earth. The impact debris formed an orbiting disk, and it clumped together. Et voilà. 4/x

A whole bunch of cool stuff happened after that. But our moon rock comes into the picture around 600 million years later, around the time giant space rocks were pelting the Moon, Marco Inaros-style. They left some epic scars, mostly on the nearside for some unknown reason. 5/x