The Natural Selection Thread

This thread is for documenting natural selection at work.

https://www.nbc4i.com/news/inside-e...le-taking-selfie-on-arkansas-cliff/1929848609

College Student, 20, Falls to Death While Taking Selfie on Arkansas Cliff
By:

• MAYA CHUNG

Updated: Apr 16, 2019 08:57 AM EDT


A 20-year-old college student died after falling off a cliff while hiking in Arkansas.

Andrea Norton, who was a student at Briar Cliff University, was with a group of students from Sioux City, Iowa, on Saturday when she attempted to take a selfie at Hawksbill Crag and fell 100 feet to her death, according to Newton County Sheriff Glenn Wheeler.

The area is known for being a great place to snap a photo but several people have died in the hiking area in the past few years, Wheeler told CBS News.

Norton played volleyball at her university and the team has released a statement about her death.

"We are saddened by the unexpected passing of our beloved teammate Andrea Norton. #22 on the court, #1 in our hearts. Thank you for the prayers, calls, texts and emails. As Dre would say: Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. 1 John 4:4 #BattleOn," the team wrote on Twitter.

Norton is the second college student this week to fall to her death.

On Sunday, a 22-year-old Fordham student was trying to take a picture of the New York City skyline when she plummeted 30 feet from the Keating Hall Tower.

She was two weeks away from graduation.

 

https://m.sfgate.com/news/article/Man-falls-over-cliff-in-Grand-Canyon-3rd-visitor-13744166.php

Man falls over cliff in Grand Canyon; 3rd visitor death in 8 days
Deanna Paul, The Washington Post | on April 5, 2019

On March 28, another visitor tripped while taking a photo. The tourist from Hong Kong fell over a 1,000-foot rim near the Grand Canyon Skywalk. The horseshoe-shaped bridge, a famous observation and photo sight on the Hualapai reservation, was closed to the public the following day, the Associated Press reported.

Two days earlier, on March 26, another male body was discovered by authorities in a forested area nearby a hiking trail.

A National Park Service spokeswoman said that Wednesday's fatality was the "first over-the-edge death" at Grand Canyon National Park this year; the March deaths happened outside the national park's boundaries.

In 2018, Grand Canyon National Park drew nearly 6.4 million guests, a record-breaking number. The popular tourist destination saw 17 fatalities last year.

Wednesday's death prompted a warning from the National Park Service to visitors. In a statement released Thursday, the agency reminded: "Have a safe visit by staying on designated trails and walkways, always keeping a safe distance from the edge of the rim and staying behind railings and fences at overlooks."

 

https://www.outsideonline.com/2393419/selfie-deaths

Kathryn Miles
Apr 16, 2019
Selfie Deaths Are an Epidemic
A recent report found that 259 people died between 2011 and 2017 while stepping in front of the camera in often dangerous destinations. Our writer went deep on the psychology of selfies to figure out what's behind our obsession with capturing extreme risk-taking.
It began as retribution for a lost bet: in 2014, Gigi Wu, an experienced hiker from Taiwan, posed atop a snow-covered mountain, clad only in a bikini. The stunt resulted in a series of undeniably gorgeous photos. So Wu, a model and adventure sports personality, kept at it for the next four years, photographing herself on the summits of more than 100 of Asia’s most impressive peaks, always in a bikini. The images are at once absurd and beautiful, a juxtaposition Wu told Taiwan TV that she adored.

They also appealed to followers, and according to BuzzFeed, she quickly amassed thousands of them. Fans loved the way she worked both the climbing and bikini personas and encouraged her to keep at it. Haters, meanwhile, wondered why Wu would be so stupid as to climb in scanty swimwear. Actually, she didn’t—the bikini always came along in her backpack, in addition to her satellite phone, first-aid kit, and other supplies.

This January, Wu embarked upon a solo multiday traverse of Taiwan’s Yushan National Park, home to a series of 10,000-plus-foot peaks. But while attempting a summit in the park’s central mountain range, the 36-year-old Wu fell an estimated 60 to 100 feet and landed in a remote ravine. She contacted friends with her satellite phone and reported that she was unable to move the lower half of her body. They, in turn, alerted emergency workers.


The weather was bad, with temperatures below freezing. After several failed helicopter attempts to reach her, rescuers set out on foot. Wu, who was fully clothed, wrapped herself in an emergency blanket and tried to stay hydrated. According to Hong Kong’s TVB news channel, she wrote in her journal and penned quick notes to loved ones.

It would take the search-and-rescue team 43 hours to reach Wu. By the time they arrived, she had died, either from hypothermia or internal injuries or a combination of both.

In the following days, Wu’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were deleted and replaced with a memorial page, which has garnered comments from detractors and fans alike.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise.

Wu’s death, after all, is only the latest in a string of selfie-related fatalities. Termed “killfies” by some social media researchers, these accidental deaths have involved social media personalities and, of course, adventurers. Canadian rapper Jon James McMurray perished last October after crawling out onto the wing of a Cessna while filming a music video. Last October also witnessed the much-publicized deaths of travel bloggers Meenakshi Moorthy and Vishnu Viswanath, who apparently fell while taking a selfie at Yosemite’s Taft Point, a popular rock outcrop with an 800-foot drop. A month prior, Tomar Frankfurter, an 18-year-old from Jerusalem, also fell to his death in the park while reportedly taking a selfie at Nevada Fall. Last July, three stars of High on Life, a popular YouTube thrill-seeking adventure travel show, plummeted to their deaths at a waterfall near Squamish, British Columbia. And in late March, a man from Macau fell 1,000 feet to his death while attempting to take a selfie on the rim at Grand Canyon West.






Then there are the hundreds of other people you’ve probably never heard about who died trying to get the perfect cliffhanger photo. The student who fell 700 feet at Ireland’s iconic Cliffs of Moher in January. The 68-year-old woman who was fatally scalded in a Chilean geyser. The man in his fifties who was struck by lightning while hiking with a selfie pole in the Welsh mountains. The teenage girl swept away by an unexpected wave on a beach in the Philippines.

For each of these recorded deaths, there are also thousands of near misses (misfies?). These include such high-profile incidents as the woman who, in March of this year, allegedly climbed over the barrier at an Arizona zoo to take a selfie with a jaguar and was mauled by the animal; the infamous 2014 bear selfies taken by visitors at Lake Tahoe’s Taylor Creek Visitor Center during the creek’s annual salmon run; and several reports in recent years of individuals who have been gored by bison at Yellowstone. No one died in those incidents, but authorities say they could have. Selfies have resulted in peloton crashes at the Tour de France and may have contributed to a helicopter crash over New York City in March 2018. According to a report in the New York Times, the pilot, who was the only survivor, told the National Transportation Safety Board that the crash may have occurred because a passenger was trying to take a photo of his feet dangling out the helicopter door—a so-called “shoe selfie”—and might have accidentally hit the emergency fuel shut-off. All five passengers died.

It’s easy to write off these tragedies as catastrophically bad judgment. Armchair internet commentators have had a field day with each reported death. For every lament of young lives lost in the wake of Moorthy and Viswanath’s deaths, you’ll find an equal number of comments about how the two were “surprisingly stupid,” “coddled,” “careless,” or “self-obsessed.” When the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department released its medical report in January, it stated the couple was “intoxicated with alcohol prior to death.” Scorn on the internet erupted further: “Narcissism!” “Stupidity!” It didn’t seem to matter that the medical examiner also made clear that it was impossible to determine the amount of alcohol in their systems.

The National Park Service has yet to release its report detailing the inquiry into the death of Moorthy and Viswanath. (A Freedom of Information officer at the Park Service told me in March that it could be “weeks or even months” before the report is finished.) It’s unlikely that the report will shed much light on the case even after it’s made public. We may never know exactly why or how Moorthy and Viswanath fell or what caused Wu to stumble.

It can feel somehow reassuring to condemn deaths like these as foolish or self-absorbed, but that doesn’t seem entirely fair. And, frankly, emerging research doesn’t support that position.

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care found that of the 259 verifiable selfie-related deaths recorded from 2011 to 2017, more than a quarter occurred while the selfie-taker was engaged in what the study authors call “non-risky behavior.” To unpack that further, the authors found that the majority of deaths involving young men do appear to have been caused by risky behavior, while the actions of over half of females who died taking a selfie were deemed “non-risky.”

So, what’s really going on here? Is Gigi Wu’s summit project really all that different than the stylized images we love to see in glossy magazines like Outside? Do we put it in the same category as, say, elite athlete Alex Honnold’s epic free climb of El Capitan and the Oscar-winning Free Solodocumentary about his death-defying attempt?

 

That article is too fucking long.

 

http://pokemongodeathtracker.com/