Climb Mountains to Escape Zombies Say Scientists
Posted on March 5, 2015
Cornell University researchers suggest heading for the hills and climbing up mountains to escape a zombie outbreak. They suggest heading to the northern Rockies as a way to survive as long as possible.
Reading World War Z and a graduate statistical mechanics class provided inspiration to the researchers about how an actual zombie outbreak might play out in the United States. A still from World War Z, which was based on the Max Brooks novel, is pictured above. In the film the fast moving zombies were eventually able to climb up a tall barrier by massing at the wall and climbing over each other. (see below)
The researchers say think that if an actual zombie outbreak occurred it would be the big cities that would quickly fall first. It would then take weeks for the zombies to reach less densely populated areas and months for them to reach the northern montain-time zone.
Alex Alemi, a graduate student at Cornell University, says in a statement, "Given the dynamics of the disease, once the zombies invade more sparsely populated areas, the whole outbreak slows down--there are fewer humans to bite, so you start creating zombies at a slower rate. I'd love to see a fictional account where most of New York City falls in a day, but upstate New York has a month or so to prepare."
The Cornell researchers introduced their analysis from a large scale exact stochastic dynamical simulation of a zombie outbreak at the American Physical Society March Meeting.