Cold

by Bill Streever

  De Long died in Siberia, but his widow, Emma J. Wotten De Long, edited and published his journal entries under the title The Voyage of the Jeannette: The Ship and Ice Journals of George W. De Long, Lieutenant-Commander U.S.N., and Commander of the Polar Expedition of 1879–1881 (1884, Houghton Mifflin, New York).

  The origin of the name of Narwhal Island does not seem to be well documented, but during a lunchtime conversation in 2008 in Anchorage, an Inupiat hunter told me that his grandfather had sailed on the Narwhal. The hunter thought the ship might have used the island as a base during the whale hunt, probably in the late 1800s.

  Adolphus W. Greely’s quotations about the wretched conditions of camp life come from his memoirs, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York) in 1886 as Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881–84 and the Attainment of the Farthest North.

  David L. Brainard’s account of the disastrous Greely expedition was published in 1940 as Six Came Back: The Arctic Adventure of David L. Brainard ( Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis). Brainard, the last survivor of the Greely expedition, died in 1946.

  The scientific paper that estimated the caloric needs of the Greely expedition was “Chances for Arctic Survival: Greely’s Expedition Revisited,” written by Jan Weslawski and Joanna Legezynska and published in the journal Arctic (2002, vol. 4, pp. 373–79).

  W. S. Schley and J. R. Soley’s The Rescue of Greely (1885, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York) describes the rescue of Greely but also gives a vivid description of routine life aboard vessels sailing to the Arctic and the challenges they faced even when things went well.

  Windchill is a well-known concept today, but the original report by Paul Siple and Charles Passel on their work quantifying the effect of windchill was not available until 1945, when it was published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (vol. 89, pp. 177–99) as “Measurements of Dry Atmospheric Cooling in Sub-freezing Temperatures; Reports on Scientific Results of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition, 1939–1941.”

  For a remarkably detailed and engaging account of the Blizzard of 1888, read David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard (2004, Harper Perennial, New York).

  AUGUST

  Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s 1938 memoir, Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure (reprint, 2003, Island Press, Washington, DC), was a best seller when first published. For today’s readers, it remains the story of a man working alone in isolation — a story of self-discipline and toughness of spirit, body, and mind.

  An Arctic Boat Journey: In the Autumn of 1854 (1871, James A. Osgood and Co., Boston), by Isaac I. Hayes, was republished in 2007 by Kessinger Publishing (Whitefish, MT). Kessinger Publishing digitizes rare books, including many about the Arctic. Also available at www.archive.org/details/arcticboat00hayerich.

  Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram 1893–1896, and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lt. Johansen was originally published in Norwegian in 1897. It has since been republished many times, including a 2008 version published by Skyhorse Publishing (New York) under the title Farthest North: The Epic Adventure of a Visionary Explorer. The Fram is a ship with an amazing history. It has been preserved at the Frammuseet, or Museum of the Fram, on Bygdøy Island in Oslo, Norway.

  For photographs and a history of the permafrost tunnel, see www.crrel.usace.army.mil/permafrosttunnel/. Although the tunnel is not open to the public, tours are sometimes arranged for visiting students, engineers, and scientists. An admirable technical paper titled “Syngenetic Permafrost Growth: Cryostratigraphic Observations from the CRREL Tunnel Near Fairbanks, Alaska,” by Y. Shur, H. M. French, T. Bray, and D. A. Anderson (2004, Permafrost and Periglacial Processes, vol. 15, pp. 339–47), gives detailed descriptions of the permafrost tunnel’s features.

  Permafrost is usually defined as ground that remains at temperatures below thirty-two degrees for two years or longer. Ice may or may not be present. For example, dry bedrock in the far north may not contain ice. The permafrost zone is often divided into “continuous permafrost” and “discontinuous permafrost,” and sometimes further divided into “intermittent” and “sporadic.”

  The steppe bison recovered near Fairbanks was dubbed Blue Babe after Paul Bunyan’s ox because specks of blue iron phosphate (vivianite) dotted its skin. It was preserved through the efforts of Dale Guthrie and remains on display at the University of Alaska’s museum in Fairbanks. For a more detailed description, see Mary Lee Guthrie’s well-illustrated Blue Babe: The Story of a Steppe Bison Mummy from Ice Age Alaska (1988, White Mammoth, Fairbanks).

  We are accustomed to the properties of water through everyday experiences, but water is an amazing compound. Water is the only nonmetallic substance known to expand when it freezes. Volume increases by about nine percent when water freezes and then decreases slightly as the temperature drops further. Marianna Gosnell celebrates the properties of water in her book Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (2005, Alfred P. Knopf, New York).

  Taiki Katayama and a number of coauthors (Michiko Tanaka, Jun Moriizumi, Toshio Nakamura, Anatoli Brouchkov, Thomas Douglas, Masami Fukuda, Fusao Tomita, and Kozo Asano) described growth of bacteria from an ice wedge in the permafrost tunnel in an article called “Phylogenetic Analysis of Bacteria Preserved in a Permafrost Ice Wedge for 25,000 Years” (2007, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, vol. 73, pp. 2360–63). They wrote, “Our results suggest that the bacteria in the ice wedge adapted to the frozen conditions have survived for 25,000 years.”

  No one should visit Fairbanks without reading Terrence Cole’s engaging history of early mining, Crooked Past: The History of a Frontier Mining Camp; Fairbanks, Alaska (1991, University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks).

  Between 1979 and 2002, 16,555 hypothermia fatalities were reported in the United States, with Alaska, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Montana having the highest number of hypothermia deaths in 2002. Most of these victims died before they could be treated. The number of victims who die from rewarming shock is not known.

  Mechem’s article called “Frostbite,” available at www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic209.htm, is intended as a quick reference for medical professionals, but it includes information sure to interest anyone who travels in cold regions. It also includes interesting photographs of badly frostbitten hands, ears, and feet.

  The article “Modified Cave Entrances: Thermal Effect on Body Mass and Resulting Decline of Endangered Indiana Bats (Myotis sodalist),” by A. R. Richter, S. R. Humphrey, J. B. Cope, and V. Brack, appeared in the academic journal Conservation Biology (1993, vol. 7, pp. 407–15). Anyone who has spent time in caves will intuitively understand that modifying entrances will change airflow and, subsequently, underground climates.

  As Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s 1938 book Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure (reprint, 2003, Island Press, Washington, DC) progresses, the battle with carbon monoxide poisoning and its effect on his mind becomes increasingly important.

  Frederick Albert Cook’s description of his meal on the pole, from his 1913 book My Attainment of the Pole (Mitchell Kennedy, New York), will ring true to anyone who has spent enough time in the backcountry to begin losing significant amounts of body fat. On long backcountry trips, one often spends the first few days feeling pleasantly tired but easily satiated, but as body fat disappears, one gradually begins to feel almost constant hunger, even after a large meal.

  Part of Captain George E. Tyson’s 1871 book Tyson’s Wonderful Drift was reprinted in the collection Ring of Ice: True Tales of Adventure, Exploration, and Arctic Life (2000, Lyons Press, New York).

  In their 1941 book Kabloona: Among the Inuit, reprinted as part of the Graywolf Rediscovery Series (1996, Graywolf Press, St. Paul), Gontran De Poncins and Lewis Galantiere suggest that consumption of frozen fish will keep one warm in cold climates. More commonly among the Alaskan Inupiat, walrus meat is said to have this property.

>   Bernd Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven and Ravens in Winter are perhaps better known than his equally delightful book on winter ecology, Winter World (2003, HarperCollins, New York). Heinrich’s quotations here are from Winter World, a book that should be read and reread by anyone living in a cold climate.

  SEPTEMBER

  The quotations and some of the background information on the Little Ice Age are from Brian Fagan’s interesting book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Change Made History, 1300–1850 (2000, Basic Books, New York). This book, more than any other, brings home the reality of even relatively minor changes in climate and reminds us that climate variability and predictability are as important as or more important than temperature itself. Additional information on the Little Ice Age can be found in dozens of books and articles.

  The English vicar’s quotation is from Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel’s Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, the Year Without a Summer (1983, Seven Seas Press, Newport, RI), which explains the difficulties surrounding the association of cold weather with volcanic eruptions.

  Confusion surrounding the Pleistocene Ice Age is surprising. Also called the Quaternary glaciation and the Pleistocene glaciation, it is sometimes defined as the period during which permanent ice sheets existed in Antarctica and possibly Greenland, with fluctuating ice sheets and glaciers in other areas. During this period, temperatures fluctuated enough to allow large-scale expansion and contraction of ice sheets, or glacial and interglacial periods. It seems that many people think of the Pleistocene Ice Age incorrectly as equivalent to the Wisconsin glaciation, which lasted from about one hundred thousand years ago until about ten thousand years ago. The Wisconsin glaciation was one name for one of at least four periods of Pleistocene glaciation. The Pleistocene nominally ends, quite artificially, near the beginning of recorded human history, around ten thousand years ago, at a time that corresponds with the beginning of the current interglacial period.

  The Mayo Clinic provides an excellent description of Raynaud’s disease at http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/raynauds-disease/DS00433. The disease afflicts five to ten percent of people. Women are five times more likely than men to suffer from Raynaud’s disease.

  Darwin’s comment lamenting his failure to spot obvious signs of past glaciation comes from The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, which has been republished many times, including in 1993 (W. W. Norton, New York). Even today, people trained in periglacial geology are far more adept at spotting signs of previous glaciation than those with only a passing knowledge of the topic.

  Doug Macdougall’s Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages (2004, University of California Press, Berkeley) gives an insightful and readable history of ice ages, including the history of the science of ice ages, with well-deserved emphasis on Agassiz.

  An electronic copy of James Croll’s 1875 book Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations: A Theory of Secular Changes of the Earth’s Climate (Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh) is available at http://books.google.com/books?id=Q98PAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=croll#PPP2,M1.

  As recently as forty years ago, before the reality of global warming was widely recognized, serious scientists pondered the problem of the end of the current interglacial period and renewed cooling. Plans for preventing the return to a glacial period were discussed in earnest, including the possibility of intentionally scattering coal dust on the ice caps to melt the ice and end the reflection of heat back into space. An April 28, 1975, article in Newsweek described “a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968” and reported on “ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change.” These discussions and the media attention they drew undoubtedly delayed the acceptance of data suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to warmer temperatures.

  It is often possible in Alaska to see the evidence of recent Pleistocene glaciation confounded by the evidence of older Pleistocene glaciation. It can be amusing to listen to scientists debate glaciation patterns in the field based on evidence they can observe from the edge of the road. They often use words such as “obvious” and “self-apparent” as they contradict one another’s ideas. The further back one goes in time, the more speculative and obscure the evidence becomes.

  Gabrielle Walker’s wonderful Snowball Earth: The History of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It (2003, Three Rivers Press, New York) explains the scientific and human history of the Snowball Earth theory and provides a nice sketch of Paul Hoffman.

  Paul K. Feyerabend’s Against Method (1993, Verso, London) argues that the strength of personalities may be as important as data to the successful advancement of scientific ideas.

  OCTOBER

  The description of the job opportunity was reported in “NASA Offers $5000 a Month for You to Lie in Bed,” by Alexis Madrigal (May 7, 2008, Wired Science,http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/nasa-offers-500.html).

  Much of the discussion of hibernation and other aspects of winter ecology stems from work described in Bernd Heinrich’s Winter World (2003, HarperCollins, New York). Additional excellent information on hibernation and other winter adaptations comes from Peter Marchand’s Life in the Cold (1996, University Press of New England, Hanover, NH) and James Halfpenny and Roy Ozanne’s Winter: An Ecological Handbook (1989, Johnson Books, Boulder, CO).

  Today technical publications on ecological studies are almost without exception steeped in complex statistical analyses, but Edmund Jaeger’s “Further Observations on the Hibernation of the Poor-Will” (1949, Condor, vol. 51, pp. 105–9) provides an example of the sort of natural history that was the foundation of the science of ecology — hard-won observations from the field backed up by orderly thinking.

  The two University of Minnesota researchers were J. R. Tester and W. J. Breckenridge. They described their work in a 1964 article titled “Winter Behavior Patterns of the Manitoba Toad, Bufo hemiphrys, in Northwestern Minnesota” (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, series A. IV, Biologica, vol. 71, pp. 424–31). One cannot help but wonder what their families and nonbiologist friends thought when the two researchers explained that they were tracking toads, but biologists often find themselves explaining their work to incredulous nonspecialists.

  John Burroughs’s description of his discovery of a hibernaculum comes from his 1886 book chapter “A Sharp Lookout,” which is available online at http://kellscraft.com/Burroughs,John/SignsandSeasons/SignsandSeasonsCh01.html. The full book, Signs and Seasons, was published by Riverside Press (Cambridge, MA).

  William Schmid’s work was published in 1982 as “Survival of Frogs in Low Temperature” in the prestigious journal Science (vol. 215, pp. 697–98). Among other things, Schmid’s article says that higher levels of glycerol during winter are related to frost tolerance. One wonders what the nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs would have thought about in-depth physiological work on frozen frogs.

  The passage from Lynn Rogers’s “A Bear in Its Lair” (October 1981, Natural History, pp. 64–70) describing his bear den encounter has been reprinted in full and in part many times. Although Rogers eloquently describes his experience, many bear biologists have similar stories. They work casually with large and potentially dangerous animals and are occasionally reminded of their own mortality.

  The Pennsylvania State University student posted a description of his experience at the Barrens at http://lamar.colostate.edu/~benedict/weather/barrens.shtml.

  Within Pennsylvania, there are other barrens: the Moosic Mountain Barrens and the Serpentine Barrens are two examples. John McPhee’s 1967 article “The Pine Barrens,” published in the New Yorker and later republished as a short book (1968, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York), describes life in one of America’s more accessible barrens, in New Jersey. Many of the barrens scattered across the United States have been overcome by suburban sprawl, an unfortunate situation, since barrens often su
pport unique plant and animal communities.

  Scott Weidensaul’s contribution to the avian literature Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (1999, North Point Press, New York) provides useful information on bird migration. The quotations from Magnus, Aristotle, and Homer are cited in Jean Dorst’s The Migrations of Birds (1962, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) and Weiden-saul’s Living on the Wind.

  Bird collisions are an important conservation issue. Collisions with windows may kill more than one hundred million birds each year. An additional fifty million to one hundred million are killed in collisions with cars and trucks. Bird collisions with aircraft also pose a serious problem for both birds and aircraft. For example, a 1995 crash of an AWACs battlefield radar plane was attributed to collisions with geese, and a 1998 commercial jet flight made an emergency landing after experiencing an engine malfunction caused by a bird strike. In 2009, as Cold was going to press, another commercial flight was forced to make an emergency landing—this time in the Hudson River—when a bird strike caused engine failure. USA Bird Strike Committee maintains records, including photographs, of aircraft-bird collisions.

  The estimate of one hundred million birds per year killed by cats in the United States is provided by the National Audubon Society. Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College has estimated that cats kill seven million birds each year in Wisconsin alone.

  NOVEMBER

  The 2004 article on damselfish enzymes, by Glenn C. Johns and George N. Somero, is called “Evolutionary Convergence in Adaptation of Proteins to Temperature: A4-Lactate Dehydrogenases of Pacific Damsel-fishes (Chromis spp.)” (Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 314–20). Although the article is highly specialized, it is to some degree accessible to anyone with basic biological training.

  The discussion about the cod fishery and other events of the Little Ice Age draws on Brian Fagan’s The Little Ice Age: How Climate Change Made History, 1300–1850 (2000, Basic Books, New York).