Hello everyone. My name is Sean and welcome to Scary Interesting
and welcome to part 9 of A Collection of Horrible Fates.
The stories in today's video are examples of groups of people
who, by some circumstance or another, have their fates intertwined in ways that they could have never imagined.
As always, viewer discretion is advised.
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Of all of the places on Earth that are considered remote, desolate and unreachable,
a few can rival the conditions in Antarctica.
Due to the lake effect, the coastlines are by far the most hospitable on the continent
but that doesn't stop it from being on average the coldest, driest and windiest of any of the seven continents.
It also happens to be the highest average elevation with several mountain ranges streaking across the landmass.
In addition to the elevation of the actual land itself,
there is a coating of ice across the entire continent that has an average of 1.9 kilometers (1.18 mi) thick.
As you might imagine, this makes it very difficult for life to thrive there.
There are just a few species of plants and animals endemic to the continent, most of which sparsely inhabit the coastlines.
And then, there are people.
As we have a knack for doing, we successfully spread to almost every corner of the earth.
This includes a fairly extensive permanent habitation even in Antarctica.
In the summertime, the population is around 5,000 people.
This drops to around 1,000 in the winter in the stations across the continent.
The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station is the southernmost of these stations.
It actually sits directly on the South Pole.
Because of this and the Earth's tilt, it receives six months straight of sunlight in the summer and six months straight of darkness in the winter.
During the winter darkness, temperatures can drop as low as -75 Celsius or below -100 Fahrenheit.
The 80,000-square foot (7,432-sq m) main building has two levels and sits on height adjustable posts to prevent the station from being buried in the snow.
And despite how little precipitation there is, it never thaws so any accumulated snow can form massive snow drifts in the harsh winds.
During the summer, the station keeps around 150 people and in the winter, this drops to just a few dozen.
These dozen members are composed of just a few support staff and just a few scientists.
Not only that, but for close to nine months, the people at the station are almost completely isolated from the outside world.
The temperatures are too cold for planes to fly,
so from mid February to late October, they're almost as isolated as the astronauts on the space station.
In May of the year 2000, one of the scientists on base during the long isolation was Australian astrophysicist Rodney Marks.
On the 11th, he was walking from one of the research buildings to the main building when he started to feel really weird.
He was having a hard time breathing, a hard time seeing, and was just feeling really tired all of a sudden.
Thinking that he might be able to sleep it off, he got back to his room and went to bed,
but instead of feeling better, he woke up at 5:30 AM throwing up blood.
He went on to go to the station's doctor three times over the course of that day and each time, his symptoms were worse and worse.
He had incredible joint pain and stomach pain, his eyes were so sensitive he had to wear sunglasses,
and on his third visit, he was in so much discomfort that he was hyperventilating.
On this third visit, the doctor gave him a sedative to calm him down which seemed to work initially.
He laid down and his breathing slowed, but shortly after that, Rodney went into cardiac arrest.
Within 45 minutes, he was pronounced dead at 6:45 PM on May 12th.
This was obviously shocking to the people on the base because deaths in Antarctica are very rare and Ronnie died so suddenly.
Due to the extreme isolation and lack of resources,
people who are chosen to stay during the winter months are heavily screened for any health risks.
If something happens, they simply lack the proper equipment for most procedures, so people chosen to stay have to be very low-risk.
For example, the doctor at the station couldn't even perform the autopsy on Mark.
They'd have to wait all the way until October until the first flights could bring his body back for proper examination.
In the meantime, it was ruled as due to unknown but natural causes, likely a heart attack or stroke.
To make matters worse, there wasn't really a place to even store the body so the people at the station had to build a casket
and store his body in the basis storage compartment.
Finally, on October 30th, Rodney was flown back to New Zealand for an autopsy where disturbing discovery was made.
The coroner discovered that Rodney had ingested around 150 milliliters of methanol.
At the station, this colorless liquid is used to clean the equipment, but it's toxic in even small amounts.
Based on this information, there were now four possibilities for how the methanol got into Rodney's system.
First, he ingested it willfully in an attempt to commit suicide.
Second, he ingested accidentally.
It is subtly sweet, so it wouldn't have been impossible to confuse it with something else.
Third, he ingested it willfully, hoping to get drunk by drinking it
and finally, someone poisoned him.
Suicide was pretty quickly ruled out because Rodney hadn't shown any signs of poor mental health
and had always flourished on the base even in the winter.
At least his friends family and coworkers felt that this was impossible just based on his normal demeanor.
In addition, he sought help on his own and seemed to not know why he was sick either.
As far as drinking it to get drunk, Rodney was known to be a heavy drinker,
but there was plenty of alcohol on the base, so recreational use was also ruled out.
This left just two possibilities -- accidental ingestion and poisoning.
Unfortunately, it was difficult to obtain solid evidence for either possibility between the time that passed from when he died
and when the investigation was conducted and how many different jurisdictions operate in Antarctica.
For example, detective sent a survey about the case but just 13 of 49 members on base at the time of his death sent it back.
Then in 2008, a coroner stated that his death couldn't be concluded either way
because of the lack of a full and proper investigation.
Shortly after that, the case fizzled out entirely, and the actual cause of Rodney's death remains a mystery.
It was either complete accident or the first known murder at the South Pole.
On August 6th, 1945, an event occurred that would forever change history.
The United States military dropped the first atomic weapon ever used in a war on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Three days later, the US military dropped the second and so far last atomic bomb ever dropped during a conflict.
This time, on the city of Nagasaki.
In total, this resulted in the deaths of around 200,000 military personnel and civilians.
These weapons were by far the greatest destructive force the world had ever seen
and remarkably, until they were dropped, were largely a secret.
An article published in Life Magazine later that year would claim that before the bombs were dropped,
only a few men on Earth knew the full scope of their power.
In fact, the project and construction were kept so secret that it actually hurt morale at several production plants involved in their construction.
Anyone who didn't directly need to know wasn't given any greater detail than they had to be
and anyone who's given the slightest detail was threatened with a 10-year prison sentence or fined up to $150,000 in today's value.
But despite not knowing what was being made, or feeling as though they were wasting their time, production continued.
By July of 1945, the final preparations were made to drop the first atomic bomb known as Little Boy.
On the 16th, a Portland-class heavy cruiser known as the USS Indianapolis
left San Francisco en route to the island of Tinian, carrying several components for the bomb's construction.
The Indianapolis and other heavy cruisers of its kind were historically designed for high speed and long range travel
and at 610 feet (186 m) long, the ship boasted just over 100,000 horsepower engines.
10 days later, the ship arrived in Tinian, dropped off its cargo, refueled and set sail again now en route to Guam.
Guam was then supposed to be the final stop before the Philippines to prepare for the land invasion of Japan in the coming weeks.
The ship was sailing through calm, clear waters three days later, and they were perfectly on schedule.
Then, just after midnight, a torpedo rocked the starboard bow and nearly blew the front end out of the water.
This ignited a storage tank carrying 3,500 gallons of aviation fuel and created another massive explosion.
A second torpedo struck the ship moments later closer to the middle of the ship, hitting fuel tanks and magazines
and ripping the Indianapolis almost in two.
The ship immediately listed to one side and because it was still moving, it started to take on a ton of water.
Soon enough, it had rolled over entirely.
For the next 10 minutes, the stern of the ship slowly rose out of the water and then at around the 12-minute mark,
the Indianapolis dipped below the water surface and plummeted to the ocean floor.
In the initial sinking, around 300 of the crew went down with the ship,
leaving a further 900 or so floating in the Pacific Ocean with few lifeboats and few life jackets.
That night was complete chaos as the men struggled to gather what was left of the sunken ship.
As the sun rose that morning, the men who were still alive pulled the life jackets off of anyone who had dodged throughout the night.
Then, they formed two groups to offer each other comfort and to help anyone who was injured.
Some of these groups were just a few dozen men and the largest was supposedly around 300.
But soon enough, all of the noise and thrashing and blood in the water attracted sharks and other animals.
During the first day and first night after the sinking, the sharks mainly ate bodies of already dead men.
On the second day, as more sharks arrived and they finished off the dead bodies,
they started to target the men who are alive and bleeding or injured.
To protect themselves, the men pushed the dead bodies away and unfortunately, in some cases, moved away from the injured men.
During the day, the sun beat down on them and dehydrated them.
At nighttime, they struggled with hypothermia.
The rations found floating in the water also frequently attracted sharks,
forcing them to throw away much of the meat they needed to survive.
On the second day, the cycle continued.
They had little food and little water and they had to listen to the sharks eat both the living and the dead floating helplessly in the water.
Then on the third day, it still wasn't known that the Indianapolis had sunk.
No one was even looking for the survivors of the wreckage.
The Navy would even intercept a message from the Japanese,
describing the attack and sinking of the ship, but dismissed it as a trick to ambush them.
By this third day, the men had figured out that staying in groups was the safest.
In particular, being in the middle of a group seemed to offer the most protection.
In contrast, being alone was by far the worst.
This almost guarantee that anyone who had been ousted from the group for being injured would not survive.
By this day, many of the men had also started to die of dehydration.
The ones who were close to death hallucinated because of it and drink seawater in their delirium.
This only sped up there dehydration and gave many of them salt poisoning.
The men whose minds were completely lost also posed a danger to anyone around them
because they thrashed around and pulled others down with them in their final desperate moments.
Finally, on the fourth day at 11 AM,
so 106 hours after the ship sank, a plane spotted the survivors in the water.
The plane immediately radioed for help and then a ship set sail to rescue them.
In the meantime, a seaplane was flown into the area to drop lifeboats and supplies
but as the pilot got close, he could actually see men being attacked by sharks.
After dropping off the supplies, he disobeyed orders to return and landed the plane in the water to pick up anyone who's in the worst condition.
Then, just after midnight, the USS Doyle arrived and pulled the remaining survivors out of the water.
Of the original 1,196 crew, only 317 were still alive.
This meant that just under 600 had died in the water from dehydration, exhaustion, injury or shark attack.
It's estimated that as many as 150 men were killed by sharks over the course of the four days.
An investigation into the incident determined that the sinking wasn't pursued more quickly for a few reasons.
First, it was customary for large ships not to report their position unless necessary.
Their schedules were generally based on their predicted position and the day of their scheduled arrival.
But that means that someone still should have noticed that the Indianapolis didn't arrive on the 31st of July.
And in fact, someone did notice.
A lieutenant was informed that the ship hadn't arrived on time, but didn't immediately investigate further.
It's unclear exactly why, but then he also failed to inform his superiors that the ship hadn't arrived,
leaving the men to float helplessly in the Pacific Ocean.
He later received a letter of reprimand for his negligence and the sinking of the USS Indianapolis
remains the greatest loss of life at sea from a single ship in US Navy history.
If you made it this far, I just want to thank for watching and I want to apologize for the short video.
I had some issues with what was supposed to be the first story for this release.
YouTube has an automated review system that flagged it as violating community guidelines.
And in fairness, it did violate guidelines and was a mistake on my part.
There's a certain event in history that occurred Manhattan at the beginning of the century that there's a strict no tolerance policy for in any context.
This is in contrast to other events that can be covered without issue.
Second, I want to thank all of you for watching.
I can't believe we're approaching 300,000 subscribers already.
As of the end of July, this channel is just six months old
and with that said, I want to assure you that I'm actively working to continue improving the channel's quality with each release.
Even now, I can't listen to some of the older videos because of the quality difference
and the goal is for that to be the case with this video in another six months.
And because your feedback is important to this process, I'm going to post a thread specifically dedicated to suggestions
for ways to improve the channel.
That way, I can get all the feedback in one spot.
In any case, thank you all so much for your patience as this channel continues to grow and evolve
and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.