In this video, we're gonna go over three stories that demonstrate just how unpredictable and mysterious fate can be.
The final story is of an event that has gone down as one of the worst in recorded history
and is extremely unlikely to ever be repeated.
As always, viewer discretion is advised.
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At 29 years old, a woman from Sweden named Anna, was studying to become an orthopedic surgeon.
She was in a great residency program in Norway,
and in the process of actually becoming a surgeon, she was working as a surgeon's assistant to gain experience.
The hospital she was working at was the University of Narvik, which is in the far north of the country.
In addition to it being so far north, it's also in the coast, which is very mountainous, essentially the entire length of Norway.
And because of this, you've got this weird mix of conditions that gives it sort of a unique climate for how north it is.
Despite it being inside the Arctic Circle, the winters are not nearly as harsh as you'd expect due to the lake effect from the ocean.
With that said, it still averages a few degrees below freezing during the winter months,
and with the mountains all around, snow sports like snowboarding and skiing are super popular and accessible.
Anna, like many others, loved to ski and not only did she love it, but she was really good at it
and often went after work with her colleagues.
On May 20th, as they often did, she and her two colleagues headed on over to the ski hills after work to do some skiing.
These hills were not only close enough to be able to head over in the evening,
but in late May in the mountains, the temperatures were still low enough for the snow conditions to be good.
So they get up there and they're having a great time in the slopes, and then part of the way through,
they get off the chairlift at the top and head over to this one particular route.
It was pretty steep and winding, but again, Anna and her colleagues were pretty advanced, so it was no problem for them.
They start going down and are getting close to the bottom when Anna loses control of her skis and starts flying down the mountain.
By the time she reached the bottom, she was going so fast that she couldn't stop herself
and was rapidly heading toward a frozen river at the end of the route.
Then, as she hit the edge of the riverbank, she twisted around and went headfirst into the ice.
And she hit so hard that her head went right through the almost foot-thick ice,
and submerged almost her entire body up to her knees in the freezing cold water.
So basically, only her boots and her skis were sticking up out of the ice.
A few moments later, when her friends caught up to her,
all they could see sticking out of the water were her skis and immediately thought the worst.
As they got up to her, they could see that Anna had her eyes open,
and had manage to get her head into a little pocket of air right under the surface of the ice.
So literally, just her face was sticking out of the water.
The rest of her body was being washed over by this freezing cold water, rapidly cooling her down.
They tried to pull her out, but the way that she was wedged underneath made it impossible.
She had hit the ice so hard and wedged so far in, and now, the current was acting almost like suction, keeping her pulled in.
They tried for a few minutes before they realized that they needed to call for help right away.
Just a minute in water that cold can start to cause hypothermia, and Anna had already been under for almost 10.
Not only that, but they risk pulling her in and getting her stuck in an area without an air pocket.
So at 6:27 PM, they called Search and Rescue, and right away, the search was launched.
Where Anna was trapped was about halfway up the mountain, near the bottom from one of the routes.
So a team was organized to come from the top and another would travel up the mountain from the bottom.
They even managed to get a helicopter on standby that was just about to leave that day.
As they waited for rescuers to arrive, her friend just held desperately onto her skis to prevent her from slipping in further,
and Anna, cooling by the second, already severely hypothermic, just sat motionless, looking out of the blurry ice.
Finally, 40 minutes later, the first rescuers got on scene and got to work right away,
but by then, Anna had already gone to cardiac arrest.
They quickly attached a rope to her legs and tried to pull her out,
but she was just wedged so awkwardly into the ice that they couldn't move.
Next, they tried to dig her out, but all they had were plastic shovels,
which would've been fine in any other situation but was not enough to break the ice.
Thankfully, the second team arrived shortly after that and they had metal shovels,
so they hacked away at the ice to make a hole big enough to eventually pull her out.
And when they finally pulled her out, an hour and 20 minutes had gone by
since she was first submerged and she was completely limp.
Thankfully, both of our colleagues were also medical doctors,
so they got to work right away, giving her medical attention.
They took note of the fact that her pupils were dilated, she had no heartbeat,
she wasn't breathing, and her temperature was just 13 Celsius or 56 Fahrenheit.
As she was airlifted to the hospital, each of her friends took turns performing CPR on her
while she was given supplemental oxygen, but Anna was completely unresponsive.
Finally, another hour later, the helicopter arrived at the hospital with Anna still pale and cold like a dead body.
Now, because hypothermia is something that they see fairly regularly in this northern part of the country,
doctors knew that you can't pronounce someone with hypothermia dead until you've warmed them up.
Anna was then hooked up to a machine that warmed her blood before recirculating it back into her body,
and then another 25 minutes later, over three hours since she had first fallen in,
her body temperature got back up to 36 Celsius or 97 Fahrenheit, and a single heartbeat was recorded,
and then another, and another, and Anna's condition slowly stabilized.
Apparently, because of how cold she was, although she wasn't breathing,
her metabolism had slowed to just 10% of normal,
meaning that despite the lack of oxygen, her cells weren't nearly as damaged as they could have been otherwise.
She spent the next 10 days in a coma before finally waking up on May 30th.
But when she woke up, she was completely paralyzed from the neck down.
Miraculously, this was only temporary, and Anna spent the next few months slowly regaining function in her body.
She has since almost made a full recovery, but did have some lasting nerve damage from the incident.
This unfortunately prevented her from becoming a surgeon, but she still went on to become a radiologist
and now actually works in the same hospital where her life was saved.
Of all of the places on Earth that are considered remote, desolate, and unreachable,
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 land mass.
In addition to the elevation of the actual land itself,
there is a coating of ice across the entire continent that is 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 enacted 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 a thousand in the winter in the stations across the continent.
The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station is the southern-most of these stations
and 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 m2) 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 Rodney died so suddenly.
Due to the extreme isolation and lack of resources,
people who are chosen to stay there in 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 a 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 base's storage compartment.
Finally, on October 30th, Rodney was flown back to New Zealand for an autopsy where a 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 it accidentally.
It is subtly sweet, so it wouldn't have been impossible to confuse it with something else.
Third, he ingested 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 in 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, detectives 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 a 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 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 was given the slightest detail
was threatened with a 10-year prison sentence or fine 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 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 bombs' 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 towards Guam.
In Guam, a number of the crew were replaced by other sailors,
and then the ship set sail to the Philippines to prepare for the land invasion of Japan in the coming weeks.
On the 30th, just after midnight, the ship was right on schedule, moving through relatively calm waters,
when all of a sudden, there was a massive explosion at the front of the ship.
This explosion was actually a torpedo that had been launched by a Japanese sub submerged nearby
and caused the entire front end of the ship to lift out of the water.
This explosion also ignited one of the fuel tanks and resulted in another massive explosion.
Then, just a few moments later, another torpedo impacted the ship and almost ripped it in half.
By then, the ship was taking on way too much water and started to sink rapidly.
Water filled the front end and caused the back end to lift out of the water, and then less than 15 minutes later,
the ship plummeted toward the ocean floor with as many as 300 individuals still on board.
But with a total of almost 1,200 on board the ship originally,
this left around 900 floating in the Pacific Ocean in complete chaos.
There was oil and debris everywhere, some of it was on fire.
Men were scattered all over the place and many of them were severely injured.
On top of that, there weren't nearly enough lifeboats or life jackets carried by the ship in the first place,
and many of those had been destroyed in the explosions and fires.
So tons of badly injured individuals floated helplessly in the Pacific Ocean,
hoping for rescue the following morning.
When the sun came up the following day, the men started to group together
to collect supplies and help anyone who is wounded.
As they did this, they started to see fins popping up at random not far from where they were.
Then, they were popping up right near the men, and then they started to feel things bump into their legs.
And after that, some of the dead bodies started to get pulled into the water.
Over the course of the night, all of the movement from the men, and more importantly,
all of the blood from the dead and injured, had attracted dozens of large Oceanic whitetip sharks.
These are some of the most aggressive sharks and can reach up to 15 feet (4.57 m) in length.
That first day, the survivors watched as the bodies in the outskirts of the larger groups got picked off
and pulled under the water.
But occasionally, a man who was still living would start to scream as he was attacked by sharks as well.
In addition to them now being hunted, they were also dangerously low on food and water
because most of it had gone down with the ship.
Soon, they started to get very thirsty.
During the day, in the area they were in, the sun scorched down on them
and the combination of heat and saltwater gave them bad sunburns and only sped up their dehydration.
Then, when the sun finally went down, it got cold enough that they were always on the verge of hypothermia.
And over the course of that night as well,
occasionally, a man would slip under the water as the sharks continued to swarm the group.
On the second day, things only got worse as more sharks arrived in the area.
The men saw fins pop out of the water every few minutes,
and as the dead bodies were finished, the sharks became more aggressive towards the living men.
'Cause not only were they severely dehydrated and covered in sunburns,
they were constantly on the watch to keep from being attacked.
Some of the men got angry and kicked and yelled, but still, the sharks persisted.
It got to the point that occasionally, even in the bigger groups, two men would be side by side,
and then one of them would get pulled under the water.
As the day wore on, they tried to push the dead away and sometimes,
even isolated anyone who was injured and bleeding.
They even refused to eat some of their canned meat rations for fear of attracting sharks.
Finally, the sun the sun set on the second day, giving them a break from the brutal heat.
But this only brought on the screams in the dark as the shark attacks continued through the night.
When the sun finally came up on the third day, horribly, the Navy still didn't even know the ship had sunk.
They had even intercepted a Japanese message that described the attack,
but it was dismissed as a trick to set up an ambush.
This meant that all of the men, now on the verge of death from dehydration, weren't even being looked for.
And on this third day, the delirium had started for many of the men who had the worst dehydration.
Some of them saw ships and islands off in the distance,
and some of them randomly swam under the water.
And tragically, many of them started to drink sea water, but this only sped up the process and poisoned them.
These men also posed a risk to everyone around them
as they thrashed around and occasionally pushed others onto the surface.
Once again, the sun set, and there was no rescue anywhere in sight.
The following morning, there were many more bodies in the water as many of the men passed from dehydration,
and many more of them had been pulled into water and eaten by sharks.
Then, at around 11:00 AM, they heard a plane off in the distance.
The plane got closer and closer and eventually flew directly over them.
Thankfully, this was a US plane that happened to be in the area
that immediately radioed for a search and rescue once they spotted the survivors.
Shortly after that, a sea plane was flown into the area, carrying lifeboats and rations
to keep the men sustained until a ship could come to pick them up.
As the pilot got closer, he could actually see the sharks circling and attacking the men,
so he decided instead to land in the water and take those who were in the worst condition.
Once he was loaded up and the supplies were dropped off, he let them know help was on the way,
and then disappeared off into the distance.
Finally, just after midnight on the fourth night,
they all saw the bright spotlight of the USS Doyle off in the distance.
This ship would pull out all the remaining men, which by then, was just 317 of the original 1,196.
This means that of the approximately 900 that were in the water after the ship sank,
around 600 died of dehydration, injuries, and shark attacks.
The official estimates put the number of shark attack deaths between several dozen and as many as 150.
An investigation into the incident determined that the sinking wasn't pursued more quickly for a few reasons.
First, it was customary for larger ships not to report the position unless necessary.
Their schedules were generally also based on predicted position and the day of their scheduled arrival.
But that means that someone 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,
and its thought to be the single deadliest shark attack in all of history.
If you made it this far, I just want to thank you for watching, and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.