Frozen Lake Gamble
Part 1
The Siberian wind bit at Ruslan's exposed cheeks. "Bear, are you sure about this route?" he shouted. The snowmobile strained against the deep drifts. Руслан gripped the handlebars tighter. He had to trust Bear. Survival depended on it. "Trust me, Ruslan!" Bear yelled back, his voice barely audible over the wind. "We need to cross the frozen lake. It's faster."
They reached the lake's edge. The ice looked solid, but Ruslan felt a knot of unease. He remembered something from his polar survival training. "Bear, wait!" Руслан jumped off the snowmobile. "[[Ice near the shore is often thinner because of warmer ground temperatures.]] We need to check the thickness further out." He grabbed an ice ax from the sled.
Bear frowned. "We don't have time for that!" But Ruslan ignored him. He walked cautiously onto the ice, chopping with the ax every few steps. The ice held firm for a while, then...CRACK! A spiderweb of fissures appeared around his feet. "I'm going to fall!" Руслан shouted, scrambling back to shore.
Bear’s face paled. "Okay, okay, you were right." He pulled out a map. "There's a longer route through the forest. It'll take us an extra day." Ruslan looked at the map, then at the approaching blizzard. He saw three possible paths marked: a treacherous mountain pass, a dense forest known for its bears, or a seemingly abandoned logging road. Which way to go?
Knowledge Pieces
- The event horizon is the boundary around a black hole where gravity becomes so strong that nothing, not even light, can get out.
- The closest known black hole to Earth is about 1,560 light-years away, which is super far, but still closer than most stars.
- Black holes are like cosmic vacuum cleaners, so dense that not even light can escape their pull, and the first one was discovered in 1964.
- Supermassive black holes, found at the center of most galaxies, can be millions or even billions of times heavier than our Sun.
- Scientists first theorized about black holes in the 1700s, but it wasn't until Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1915 that we had a solid scientific explanation.