Death
On Christmas Eve 1971, Koepcke traveled with her 17 year old daughter on LANSA Flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa to join her husband for a holiday. The plane encountered a severe thunderstorm, was hit by lightning, and disintegrated above the Amazon Rainforest. Seated next to each other, the Koepkes were separated in mid-air (with Juliane remaining belted to their row of three seats), and both survived the fall. Coming to rest in different areas of the jungle floor, Maria was badly injured and died several days later. Juliane, despite sustaining a broken collar bone and an eye injury, was able enough to travel through the dense jungle for eleven days, before reaching a makeshift logging camp and being subsequently rescued on January 3, 1972.
Juliane returned with her father to Germany in March, 1972, where she fully recovered from her injuries, continued her studies, and became a PhD zoologist like her parents.
Koepcke is commemorated in the names of:
- Koepcke's Screech Owl, Megascops koepckeae
- Koepcke's Hermit, Phaethornis koepckeae
- Selva Cacique, Cacicus koepckeae
Read more about this topic: Maria Koepcke
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15:21-22.
“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)