'While hanging ice curtains or pillars get horizontal cracks and fail catastrophically from people swinging their picks into them, it is near impossible that the ice would crack catastrophically like that if it is a solid block,' said Mills. Given that the Wall is made of solid ice, not very likely. How likely is this sort of rippling crack and catastrophic icefall?

Of course, the most dramatic moment in the Wall-climbing scene involves the massive sheet of ice that shears off because of a crack created by Ygritte's axe. (Mills notes that the Game of Thrones propmasters are using modern Black Diamond crampons adapted to look older.) Similarly, while the sort of ice axes that Tormund and company use are too advanced, they were preceded by an alpine tool called an alpenstock, a longer wooden pole with a spiked tip that also dates back to the 1500s. For the first few parts of the fight, the chunk of ice stands firmly still on the top of Icicle Mountain.After a certain time passes, the stage breaks off, and lands in the water with mighty force. It takes place on a huge chunk of ice with a couple of platforms hovering above it. A form of crampons-ice climbing shoes with spikes-dates back to the 1500s, when Alpine shepherds attached spikes made from horseshoes to their boots. The Summit is a stage in Super Smash Bros. The Wildlings do use accurate ice climbing gear like ice axes and crampons on their climb, and while the modern tools we see in this episode weren't around in the 15th century ballpark of Game of Thrones, there were more rudimentary versions used by climbers of earlier eras. 'You'd barely have to touch it,' said Mills. But with the rope so taut, it would sever almost instantaneously. And it's subject to one of the same nit-picks: When Orell decides to cut the rope and send Jon and Ygritte tumbling, it takes him several moments to saw through it. 'The ropes are using are completely static with no give, so the instantaneous impact force of someone taking a vertical fall would be huge!' Since the force of the fall is concentrated at a single moment, rather than distributed more gradually by rope stretch, there's also a good chance that the impact could snap this type of rope entirely.Īlso, either intentionally or unintentionally, Mills says the scene where Orell cuts the rope above Jon and Ygritte is reminiscent of a similar rope-cutting scene in the film Vertical Limit, one of the movies most frequently mocked by climbers for its technical inaccuracies. 'The ropes we use in modern climbing are dynamic-they stretch, which reduces the force,' said Mills. Similarly, when Tormund embeds his axe in the ice and catches the three climbers in his team during the icefall-and when Jon does the same moments later to save Ygritte-their axes might stay lodged in the Wall, but Mills says the climbers would almost certainly lose their grip on them given the massive force of the falls, which are increased even further by the type of rope they use. Image: HBO You know nothing about peak forces, Jon Snow.

Ice climber stage