Cold

by Bill Streever

  Gabrielle Walker, in her book 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), describes Douglas Mawson’s book as “one of the best books ever written about Antarctic exploration, and yet little known outside Australia.” Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard (1998, St. Martin’s Press, New York).

  Robert Rosenberg’s 2005 article “Why Is Ice Slippery?” (December 2005, Physics Today, pp. 50–55) inspired a response by Vitaly Kresin describing work done in 1891 by the renowned experimental physicist Robert Wood. Wood put a block of ice in a powerful hydraulic press to demonstrate that pressure would not melt the water, arguing against what was then called the pressure-molten theory. Nevertheless, the belief that pressure from skis and ice skates melts the underlying ice remains alive today, even in textbooks.

  In addition to being recognized as the world’s northernmost tree, the dahurian larch is also long-lived. One dahurian larch in Yakutia, in Siberia, is believed to be more than nine hundred years old.

  The diminutive willows, as they are sometimes known collectively, may be quite old despite their size. Individuals of 180 and 236 years old have been reported from Greenland.

  Peter Marchand’s Life in the Cold (1996, University Press of New England, Hanover, NH) provides very useful descriptions of plant adaptations to cold, including tables of temperature tolerances. In addition, March-and provides information on human tolerance of cold in a chapter called “Humans in Cold Places.” Similarly, James Halfpenny and Roy Ozanne’s Winter: An Ecological Handbook (1989, Johnson Books, Boulder, CO) provides useful information in a chapter titled “People and Winter.”

  What may have been Alaska’s northernmost accessible tree of any size grew next to the Dalton Highway, which runs parallel to the Trans Alaska Pipeline and connects Fairbanks to the North Slope oil fields. A prominent sign with large blue letters was erected in front of the tree saying FARTHEST NORTH SPRUCE TREE ON THE ALASKAN PIPELINE. DO NOT CUT. Perhaps inevitably, someone girdled the tree, apparently with the sort of small hatchet often carried by campers, ultimately killing it. There are, however, a number of smaller black spruce trees farther north just off the highway. They are not protected by signs and may eventually outgrow their protected but now dead neighbor.

  Bernie Karl, the current owner of Chena Hot Springs Resort, is an out-spoken entrepreneur. In addition to running his Aurora Ice Museum, he experiments with geothermal power, including generation of power using relatively low-temperature (less than two hundred degrees) hot spring water. He also heats his greenhouse with water from a hot spring.

  Charles Darwin’s description of events in Tierra del Fuego comes from The Voyage of the Beagle, first published by Henry Colburn in 1839 but reprinted many times and readily available as a Penguin Classic (1989, London). Readers of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species will find a different Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin the scientist and thinker is still very much present, but he is accompanied by Darwin the seasick adventurer, a much more interesting and charming narrator.

  The quotation about frostbite is from an e-medicine online clinical reference called “Frostbite,” written by C. Crawford Mechem of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine ( www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic209.htm). However, bearing in mind the history of race relations, one cannot dismiss the possibility that some of the differences seen in some studies and statistics reflect biases in the treatment of the research subjects. For example, it may not be possible to know whether black soldiers in Korea were given similar training, issued similar gear and food, and sent on similar missions as white soldiers. The most grievous example of racism in the annals of cold research comes from Nazi experiments at Dachau. This “research” is ignored here for ethical reasons.

  Most of the information on the University of Alaska experiment comes from Ned Rozell’s article “The Skinny on Humans and Cold” (February 6, 1997, The Alaska Science Forum, no. 1323). Rozell works for the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, translating arcane research into interesting articles that appear in numerous publications. Laurence Irving’s book Arctic Life of Birds and Mammals, Including Man (1972, Springer-Verlag, New York), which includes a description of his experiment, is out of print but can be found in some collections.

  Charles Wright’s interviewer was Charles Neider, who edited the book Antarctica: Firsthand Accounts of Exploration and Endurance (2000, Cooper Square Press, New York).

  DECEMBER

  True Chinook winds are a type of foehn wind — a wind whose temperature increases as it moves down the downwind side of a mountain range. The temperature increase is caused by an increase in pressure with loss of altitude. Santa Ana winds are another type of foehn wind.

  Kenneth Risenhoover collected data from January through April at Denali National Park as part of a study published in 1986, “Winter Activity Patterns of Moose in Interior Alaska” (Journal of Wildlife Management, vol. 50, pp. 727–34). In winter, the park is beautiful but brutally cold. One cannot help but wonder whether Risenhoover compared his experiences to those of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his companions during their quest for penguin eggs.

  The description of the use of a hot potato to assess the insulative qualities of a flying squirrel’s nest comes from Bernd Heinrich’s Winter World (2003, HarperCollins, New York). Part of the joy of reading Heinrich’s books comes from his innovative approach to ecological research. Whereas some scientists would contrive complex field or laboratory measurements or experiments to measure the insulative qualities of nests, Heinrich used a hot potato, a watch, and a thermometer. Another wonderful aspect of Heinrich’s work is his use of quotations from difficult-to-find publications. For example, both quotations about crossbill nest insulation later in this chapter are from Winter World. The 1900 quotation is attributed to J. Grinnell’s “Birds of the Kotzebue Sound Region” (Pacific Coast Avifauna, no. 1), and the 1909 quotation is attributed to J. Macoun’s Catalogue of Canadian Birds.

  Many researchers have reported on the diversity of invertebrates found in snow, or the subnivean invertebrates. C. W. Aitchison, for example, has published a number of papers on invertebrate diversity in snow, including a series of papers in 1978 and 1979 in the Symposia of the Zoological Society of London, the Manitoba Entomologist, and Pedobiologia. A partial compilation of Aitchison’s findings provided the list of invertebrates found in snow in Canada.

  William Pruitt’s book Wild Harmony: The Cycle of Life in the Northern Forest (1988, Douglas and McIntyre, Vancouver) translates the science of the Taiga into elegant and readable prose. Pruitt is also known for work in Alaska that contributed to the end of the U.S. government’s Project Chariot, which called for the use of hydrogen bombs to dig a harbor near Point Hope. Pruitt and his colleagues working on Project Chariot undertook what is sometimes described as the first environmental assessment ever to stop a major project. Dan O’Neill’s Alaskan classic The Firecracker Boys (1994, St. Martin’s Press, New York) describes Pruitt’s role and its consequences.

  Bethany Leigh Grenald’s article “Women Divers of Japan” (Summer 1998, Michigan Today) gives one of the few contemporary accounts of ama divers in English. In an age of feminism and environmentally sustainable practices, it is difficult to understand why ama divers do not attract more attention.

  The Bowhead Whale, a special publication of the Society for Marine Mammology, edited by John Burns, Jerome Montague, and Cleveland Cowles (1993, Allen Press, Lawrence, KS), is an excellent resource on bowhead whales. Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, edited by William Perrin, Bernd Wursig, and J. G. M. Thewissen (2002, Academic Press, New York), is an extensive general resource on whales, including cold-water adaptations and feeding habits. The scientific literature on whales is remarkably vast and complex, even though these animals spend most of their time underwater in remote parts of the world’s oceans.

  The writing of J. Michael Yates is so lyrical that it blu
rs the distinction between prose and poetry. The passages here come from Yates’s story “The Hunter Who Loses His Human Scent,” first published in Man in the Glass Octopus (1970, Sono Nis Press, Vancouver). During a varied career, Yates worked as a prison guard in Canada, an experience he captured in his book Line Screw (1993, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto).

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (2000, Carroll and Graf, New York) tells the story of the recovery of the penguin eggs. Despite the book’s very appropriate title, Cherry-Garrard seems to have relished the journey, at least after the fact. One can imagine him enjoying the cold even as it beat him into submission. His two companions, Edward “Bill” Wilson and Birdie Bowers, survived the penguin egg journey only to die with Scott on the South Pole expedition.

  Chicken, Alaska, with a current population of about twenty residents, originated as a gold mining settlement around 1880. The town’s early inhabitants wanted to name their community Ptarmigan, because these chicken-like white birds were abundant in the surrounding country, but they could not agree on the admittedly odd spelling of this species. With the pragmatism of miners everywhere, they named the town Chicken instead.

  David Sibley’s The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior (2001, Alfred A. Knopf, New York) summarizes the scientific literature on feathers, including the evolution of feathers.

  JANUARY

  The hydrologists were working on the North Slope Lakes Project, described at http://www.uaf.edu/water/projects/nsl/reports/L9312_Hydro _Note_091906.pdf.

  Arctic foxes are remarkably adept at finding food in and around human camps and facilities. Begging, foraging in supposedly animal-proof Dumpsters, and even brazenly walking through open kitchen doors are all common practices. Once animals are habituated to humans, the potential for aggressive behavior increases. Rabies, of course, makes aggressive behavior even more likely.

  When a volume of air shrinks because it is compressed, the energy carried in the original volume of air is concentrated in the smaller volume, so the temperature increases. This is called adiabatic or isocaloric heating. The opposite effect is seen when pressure is reduced. Diesel engines, for example, use adiabatic heating instead of spark plugs to ignite fuel. A piston compresses air and diesel fuel until the temperature reaches the point of ignition.

  The Coriolis effect is sometimes incorrectly called the Coriolis force. The spinning of the earth creates the appearance of a force, but no force is applied.

  Most of the folk sayings about weather in this chapter are from a delightful small book by René Chaboud titled Weather: Drama of the Heavens (1996, Harry N. Abrams, New York). In addition to concise explanations about weather patterns and phenomena, the book presents dozens of color photographs depicting weather events, historical figures, and people collecting weather data from locations ranging from Siberia to Texas.

  David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard (2004, Harper Perennial, New York) provides far more details about the Blizzard of 1888.

  Lewis Fry Richardson’s Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922; reprint, 2007, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) was not his only accomplishment. Richardson also tried to use numerical analyses to understand the causes of war and is considered the cofounder of the scientific analysis of conflict, described in part in his Arms and Insecurity and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, neither of which is currently readily available. Separately, he showed that shoreline length is a function of scale and that shoreline length will increase as finer scales are used. This so-called Richardson effect is often ignored in technical papers attempting to relate shoreline length to various ecological phenomena and political or economic statistics.

  Some sources suggest that Lorenz had planned to mention a seagull’s wings rather than a butterfly’s wings. Lorenz was swayed to the butterfly by another meteorologist, Philip Merilees. The ideas expressed in the talk — intended to explain why accurate weather forecasting is so challenging — led to a blossoming of the much-misunderstood chaos theory, popularized in books and movies, including Jurassic Park. The essence of chaos theory is that small differences in initial conditions can result in huge differences in subsequent outcomes. Lorenz died on April 16, 2008, at age ninety.

  James Glaisher wrote a full account of his balloon ascent, published on September 5, 1862, as “Greatest Height Ever Reached” in the British Association Report (1862, pp. 383–85). During the ascent, Glaisher describes himself fading in and out of consciousness at high altitudes. He relates that his assistant, Mr. Coxwell, “felt insensibility coming over himself; that he became anxious to open the valve, but in consequence of his having lost the use of his hands [because of the cold] he could not, and ultimately did so by seizing the cord with his teeth, and dipping his head two or three times, until the balloon took a decided turn downwards.” The account is available at www.1902encyclopedia.com/A/AER/aeronautics-33.html.

  The anecdotes about strange weather events were found in Weird Weather, a collection compiled by Paul Simons (1997, Warner Books, London).

  Part of Barrow’s history is captured in Charles Brower’s Fifty Years Below Zero (1942, Dodd, Mead, New York). The book describes in detail the mingling of cultures — the New England whalers and the Inupiat, who were well established thousands of years before the New Englanders arrived and began slaughtering bowhead whales. The Brower family name lives on in Barrow, with many families tracing lineage to Brower himself and an entire portion of Barrow known as Browerville.

  The abundance of wildlife in the North Slope oil fields is likely caused by a combination of habitat availability, food availability (that is, from Dumpsters, workers ignoring restrictions on feeding wildlife, and other sources), and restrictions on hunting and trapping.

  Arctic backcountry travelers often argue over the need to carry fire-arms for bear protection. In one often told story, an Arctic biologist dissuaded a curious polar bear by hitting it in the head with his shotgun. Many bear biologists consider the polar bear to be less threatening than its cousin the grizzly bear. Although weapons provide psychological comfort, it is worth noting that in addition to the risk of firearm accidents, shotguns add considerable weight to a traveler’s supplies. In some cases, that weight capacity might be better used for extra food, fuel, shelter, or clothing or for a satellite telephone.

  The bearded seal, ugruk in Iñupiaq, is a large ice seal — that is, a seal species dependent on sea ice for its survival. The spring whale hunt of the Inupiat, conducted from the sea ice, relies on the use of umiaq, skin boats made from ugruk skins, because the boats are light enough to drag across the ice in search of openings where whales can be found. By the autumn hunt, the nearshore sea ice has melted, and more substantial boats made from aluminum or fiberglass are used to search for whales in the open sea.

  The 1881 expedition to Barrow was undertaken concurrently with Greely’s disastrous trip as part of the first International Polar Year. A second International Polar Year was held in 1932–33, and a third International Polar Year was held from 2007 to March 2009. The International Polar Years are intended to focus scientific effort (and funding) on the Arctic and Antarctic.

  Editor David Norton’s Fifty More Years Below Zero (2001, Arctic Institute of North America, Fairbanks) provides a history of Western science in Barrow through the turn of the twenty-first century. That history continues to evolve rapidly today. The Barrow Arctic Science Consortium provides extensive logistical support for visiting scientists, and the North Slope Borough’s Department of Wildlife Management supports and encourages both basic and applied studies.

  Work by Nathan Pamperin, Erich Follmann, and Brian Person used satellite collars to track arctic foxes as they moved across the sea ice. One fox stayed on the ice for 156 days and traveled more than fifteen hundred miles without touching shore.

  FEBRUARY

  Tom Shachtman’s Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (1999, Mariner Books, New York) provides an interesting and plainly written account of the history of
cold temperature research. It also introduced me to Frederic Tudor, who is surprisingly poorly known even in the Boston area. A biography titled “Frederic Tudor Ice King,” published in 1933 in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, is available at http://www.iceharvestingusa.com/Frederic%20Tudor% 20Ice%20King.html.

  Thomas Moore’s An Essay on the Most Eligible Construction of Ice-Houses; also, A Description of the Newly Invented Machine Called the Refrigerator (1803, Bonsal and Niles, Baltimore) is available at http://www.digitalpresence.com/histarch/library/moor1803.html.

  Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magick was first published in 1558 in Latin, but it was translated into Italian, French, and Dutch within a few years. It is available in English at http://homepages.tscnet.com/omard1/jportat5.html.

  Bacon’s speculations about Drebbel’s use of saltpeter appeared in Novum Organum, published in 1620. A 2000 version of Bacon’s work, edited and translated by Peter Urback and John Gibson, is available from Open Court Publishing (Chicago).

  By the graces of a kind of magic never imagined by the likes of Drebbel and King James I, Daemonologie, originally published in 1597, is available in full at http://watch.pair.com/daemon.html.

  Carl Wieman’s quotation comparing a hailstorm to the use of lasers to slow molecular motion comes from a 2001 National Institute of Standards and Technology news release titled “Bose-Einstein Condensate: A New Form of Matter,” available at http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/BEC_background.htm.

  Erin Biba describes Lene Vestergaard Hau’s work in which a beam of light was stopped cold in her article “Harvard Physicist Plays Magician with the Speed of Light” (October 23, 2007, Wired,www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-11/st_alphageek).

  MARCH

  Among the many reasonably accessible discussions of frostbite is one by James O’Connell, Denise Petrella, and Richard Regan called “Accidental Hypothermia and Frostbite: Cold-Related Conditions,” in The Health Care of Homeless Persons — Part II — Accidental Hypothermia and Frostbite,http://www.nhchc.org/Hypothermia.pdf.