Losing someone that you care about is hard enough, but losing them in a tragic way, like when they go missing, can be especially traumatic. But imagine the horror you would feel if you were the one to find the body of your friend several months after they disappeared.
That’s exactly what happened to Rodney Hogg, who lost his friend Peter when he was climbing the same part of Mount Everest just a few months earlier. Hogg found Peter’s body preserved in the ice along the trail of the mountain. The ill-fated climber is one of many people to go missing each year attempting to climb that peak.
Ancient Plants
In the mid-1500s, Canada experienced an era known as the “Little Ice Age,” which covered the Ellesmere Island region of the country in permafrost. Most of the plants in the area were snuffed out for good, but some of the area’s mosses were apparently pretty tough because more than 400 years later when the ice started to melt, they began to come back to life.
The melting Teardrop Glacier continues to reveal more of the region’s resilient flora, which researchers dated to somewhere between 400-600 years old in a report that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Mysterious Green Boots
Rodney Hogg’s friend Peter was one of the nearly 200 people that go missing every year on Mount Everest. Ironically, some people pay up to $25,000 for the “privilege” of attempting to summit the mountain.
Regular climbers have reported that finding bones along the trails is nothing out of the ordinary, but one day they stumbled upon a pair of green boots sticking out of the snow that researchers believe belonged to an unfortunate climber who got stuck on the mountain several decades ago. The seasoned guide who found the boots claims that he found a shocking 3 bodies that summer alone.
The Icy Pyramid
Scientists first stumbled upon what they thought was another pyramid buried deep in the icy mountains of Antarctica between 1910-1914, but they did not reveal the discovery to the general public until several decades later. Imagine that. Did the Egyptians reach the south pole? Surely not.
The secretive nature of the findings led to several conspiracy theories about the formation to arise. But as it turns out the “pyramid” was simply a part of the mountain range, and there is nothing extraterrestrial about it. Technically, the peak is called a “nunatak,” which basically just means the point of a rock poking up from a subglacial mountain range.
Lyuba: The Baby Mammoth
This poor baby woolly mammoth did not stand a chance against the frozen tundra of Russia. She was discovered near the Yuribei River in 2007 by a reindeer herder that happened to be passing by the area. Researchers dated her perfectly preserved body to more than 40,000 years old, believe it or not.
After scientists performed an autopsy of the mammoth, they found that it was not the ice itself that killed her but rather the mud around the banks of the river. Apparently, her trunk was full of mud, which leads them to believe that she suffocated. Poor thing.