Polar Night
Cases unlock in order, like levels. This is case 13 of 100.
Polarlys research station, Svalbard, January, 6:10 am. Glaciologist Leif Nygaard was found dead inside the ice core cold room, at minus 25 degrees, with the door bolted from the outside.
It is polar night: the sun has not risen for two months. A storm has closed the airstrip, and the plane from Longyearbyen won't arrive for three days.
At 8:00 am, Leif was due to make the weekly radio call with the institute in Oslo. Besides him, three people spent the night on the base. One of them bolted that door.
The station mess hall, windows black with polar night, the storm pounding the metal walls.
Suspects
Sigrid LundeBase doctor, 54
Torvald BrekkeRadar technician, 38
Zofia WronaPolish geologist, 34
The real case
The death of Rodney Marks at the South Pole station
Antarctica, May 2000
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Rodney Marks, a 32-year-old Australian astrophysicist, died on 12 May 2000 at the Amundsen-Scott station at the South Pole, in the middle of the Antarctic winter. With the base cut off for months and no flights possible, his body could only be flown out in the spring. The autopsy, in New Zealand, found methanol poisoning.
No one was able to explain how the methanol was ingested: accident, suicide and foul play were all considered. The New Zealand inquest complained about the limited cooperation of the institutions involved, and the case remains unresolved. In 2018, another Antarctic base, Russia's Bellingshausen station, recorded a stabbing between colleagues, which ended without a death.
The game borrows the suspicious death at a polar base sealed off by winter, with no police and only a few colleagues as suspects. Characters, method and outcome are fiction.
Sources
Case glossary
Words from this case you might not know.
- Svalbard
- A Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
- Longyearbyen
- The main town of Svalbard and one of the northernmost settlements in the world.
- polar night
- The period in polar regions when the sun stays below the horizon for more than 24 hours, sometimes for months.
- glaciologist
- A scientist who studies glaciers, ice sheets and other forms of natural ice.
- ice core
- A long cylinder of ice drilled from a glacier; its layers preserve records of past climate going back thousands of years.