by John Lloyd
‘Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’ began life demurely as ‘cold enough to freeze the tail off a brass monkey’. It was first recorded in mid-nineteenth-century America and variants of it were used as often about extremes of heat as they were of cold. In Herman Melville’s novel Omoo (1850) one of the characters remarks that ‘It was ’ot enough to melt the nose h’off a brass monkey’.
Michael Quinion of www.worldwidewords.org suggests that the ‘monkey’ element originated in the popular nineteenth-century brass ornaments featuring the three monkeys that ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’.
Clustering round a roaring Dickensian fire on a winter’s night, far inland from the sea, what better reminder could there be of how cold it is outside than the line of cheeky brass monkeys sitting on the mantelpiece?
What would you find on the ground at the northernmost tip of Greenland?
You will struggle to find any snow or ice at all. You are most likely to bump into a large, malodorous beast known as the musk ox.
Peary Land is a mountainous peninsula extending from northern Greenland into the Arctic Ocean. It is the most northerly ice-free land on Earth. Lying 725 kilometres (450 miles) south of the North Pole and covering 57,000 square kilometres (22,000 square miles), it is bigger than Denmark. It was first mapped in 1892 by the American explorer Robert E. Peary (1856–1920), who modestly named it after himself.
Dry enough to be counted as a desert, it is frost-free for three months in the summer, when temperatures often exceed 10 °C and can reach 18 °C. Winter is very cold, though: usually around –30 °C. Rain is rare and the very occasional snow that falls is so dry it simply drifts away and never forms into ice.
Vegetation covers only 5 per cent of the total area but thirty-three species of flowering plant have been recorded and this is enough to support the population of 1,500 musk oxen.
Despite their names, musk oxen are actually large, shaggy members of the goat family. They get their name from the intense smell the males secrete from glands under their eyes when aroused. Musk-ox hair can grow almost 60 centimetres (2 feet) long, covering them in a thick-fringed pelt that reaches to the ground. This keeps them warm but it also means they aren’t particularly fast on their feet.
Their defensive strategy is to form a circle around the younger and more vulnerable members of the herd and try to stare down any predators.
Historically, this worked well with Arctic wolves and bears, but wasn’t much use against men with rifles. At the turn of the twentieth century, they had been hunted to the brink of extinction. They are now a protected species and the Arctic population has recovered to 150,000 individuals.
Musk oxen are ancient. They evolved over 600,000 years ago and were contemporaries with the woolly mammoth, the giant ground sloth and the sabre-tooth tiger. They are one of very few large mammal species to have survived the last Ice Age, which reached its peak 20,000 years ago.
How cold is ‘too cold to snow’?
It’s never too cold: at least, not in this world.
Anyone who lives in a country where it snows in winter will have heard people say, ‘It’s been trying to snow all day, but it’s just too cold!’
This is never the case. Snow has been recorded in Alaska at below –41 °C and there are reports of snow falling at the South Pole at an incredible –50 °C. Flakes have even been made in the lab at –80 °C, which is as cold as the coldest parts of Antarctica ever get. It is true that, at temperatures below –33 °C very little ordinary ‘snow’ is produced. Instead, individual ice crystals fall to Earth in a phenomenon known as ‘diamond dust’. These are so cold they can’t clump together to form the familiar snowflakes, but they are still snow.
The reason why it doesn’t always snow when it’s cold is that, in northern Europe, very cold weather is usually associated with high pressure. In an area of high pressure, there is little air movement, so the cold air gradually sinks, warming as it falls. This means that any water in the air evaporates completely rather than forming into clouds. In summer, this produces hot, clear weather. In winter, it allows heat from the ground to rise upwards, because there is no insulating cloud layer. This lowers the ground temperature, particularly at night, when there is no sun to warm it. Although it’s bitterly cold, there are no clouds to produce snow.
Not that this means it is necessarily warmer when it’s snowing.
The coldest temperature ever recorded in England was –26.1° C at Newport, Shropshire on 10 January 1982 – a day also notable for its heavy snowfall.
Where do you lose most of your body heat?
Not necessarily, as Mummy warned you, from the top of your head.
The amount of heat released by any part of the body depends largely on how much of it is exposed. On a cold day, you could easily lose more body heat from a bare arm or leg.
That myth about the head is not only persistent, it’s official. The current field manuals for the US Army recommend a hat in cold weather, stating: ‘40 per cent to 45 per cent of body heat’ is lost through the head. The idea is thought to stem from the 1950s, when military scientists put subjects in Arctic survival suits (that didn’t cover the head) to measure heat loss in extremely low temperatures.
According to Professor Gordon Giesbrecht, at the University of Manitoba, the world’s leading expert on cold-weather survival, the head and neck are only 10 per cent of our body surface area and are no more efficient at losing heat than the rest of our skin.
If our heads seem to get colder it’s because the concentration of nerve cells in our head and neck makes them five times as sensitive to changes in temperature as other areas. But information from our nervous system (feeling cold) isn’t a direct indication of heat loss. This depends on the circulation of the blood – and there isn’t a corresponding increase in blood vessels in the head and neck.
Our bodies respond to cold by closing the blood vessels in exposed skin and reducing blood flow to the extremities. This makes the fingers, toes, nose and ears susceptible to frostbite, while the brain and vital organs are unaffected. The other response to cold is shivering: our muscles shake involuntarily to generate heat by using up energy. Both responses are automatic, controlled by a cone-shaped part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which also governs other instinctive processes such as hunger, thirst and tiredness.
Professor Giesbrecht is no armchair theorist. Since 1991, he has put himself into states of hypothermia at least thirty-nine times to study the effects of cold on the human body. Hypothermia (from Greek hypo ‘under’. and therme, ‘heat’) is the point at which our internal temperature drops below 35 °C, and the body’s key processes start to slow down. This has led the redoubtable Dr Giesbrecht to plunge repeatedly into frozen lakes and hurtle a snowmobile at night into freezing seas. This, and the survival guides he has published, has earned him the nickname ‘Professor Popsicle’, after North America’s favourite iced lolly.
Dr Giesbrecht advises that the key to survival if you suddenly find yourself in an icy lake is to master your breathing in the first minute. Once your breathing is steady, you have ten minutes before the cold starts affecting your muscles and an hour before hypothermia sets in. Other tips: hot drinks do not help beat the cold (though sugary drinks do, as they provide fuel for the body to generate heat). And don’t blow on your hands to keep warm. The moisture in your breath makes them colder and increases the risk of frostbite.
DAVID MITCHELL Is it not just a fact that your head is a bit of you that is more naked than the rest of you?
STEPHEN Well, that’s right, if your arm was exposed, more would escape from your arm than from your head.
DAVID If people went around with bare buttocks a lot, they would say: ‘Well, in the cold you really should put on a buttock hat.’
What colour should you wear to keep cool?
We’re all told at school that white reflects sunlight and black absorbs it, so that the paler your clothes are, the cooler you’ll be.
In many hot countries, locals often wear dark colours. Peasants in China and old ladies in southern Europe, for instance, traditionally wear black, and the Tuareg, the nomadic people of the Sahara, favour indigo blue.
Dark clothes are effective because there are two thermal processes happening at once. Heat is coming downwards from the sun but it is also going outwards from the body. Though light clothes are better at reflecting the sun’s heat, dark clothes are better at radiating the body’s heat. Given that no one born in a hot climate willingly stands in direct sunlight, the dark clothing has the edge because it keeps you cooler when you’re in the shade.
Then there’s the wind factor. People who live in really hot places don’t wear tight jumpers or tailored suits. They wear loose robes that enable maximum air circulation. In 1978 a study examining the significance of colouring in birds’ plumage found that, in hot and still conditions, white feathers were best at letting heat escape; but as soon as the wind got above 11 kilometres per hour (7 miles per hour), black feathers – provided they were fluffy – were the most efficient coolers. Experiments on black and white cattle have reached similar conclusions.
Applying this to humans, given even a modest breeze, loose black clothes will carry heat away from your body faster than they absorb it.
In less extreme climates, one of the best ways to keep cool is to learn how to use windows properly. Physicists at Imperial College, London have shown that optimum air flow in a room comes from opening both the top and bottom sections of a sash window.
If the two openings are of equal size, colder, heavier air coming in through the lower gap pushes the warmer, less dense air out of the top, much as a cooling gust ventilates a Tuareg’s flowing garment, known as a k’sa.
The equivalent robe in French-speaking West Africa is called a Grand Boubou.
Is there any land on Earth that doesn’t belong to any country?
Yes, there are two such places.
The first is Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica, which is so remote that no government seems to want it.
It’s a vast swathe of the Earth’s surface, spreading out from the South Pole to the Antarctic coast and covering 1,610,000 square kilometres (622,000 square miles). This is larger than Iran or Mongolia, but it’s so inhospitable that it supports only one permanent base, which belongs to the USA. Marie Byrd Land is named after the wife of US Rear-Admiral Richard E. Byrd (1888–1957), who first explored it in 1929. The remote research station was the inspiration for John Carpenter’s classic horror film, The Thing (1982).
The rest of Antarctica is administered by twelve nations under the Antarctic Treaty system established in 1961, which made the continent a scientific preserve and banned all military activity there. The biggest territories belong to the nations that first explored the continent (Britain, Norway and France) and those that are closest (New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Argentina). The ocean beyond Marie Byrd Land stretches up into the empty reaches of the South Pacific, where no one nation is close enough to claim it as their own.
The legal term for a territory outside the sovereign control of any state is Terra nullius, literally ‘no-man’s-land’. Although Marie Byrd Land is the biggest remaining example, there is one small tract of Africa that can claim the same status.
The Bir Tawil Triangle lies between Egypt and Sudan and is owned by neither. In 1899, when the British controlled the area, they defined the border between the two countries by drawing a straight line through a map of the desert. This put Bir Tawil in Sudan and the piece of land next door, called the Halai’b Triangle, in Egypt. The boundary was redrawn (using wigglier lines) in 1902. Bir Tawil (‘water well’ in Arabic) went to Egypt, and Halai’b to the Sudan.
Bir Tawil is the size of Buckinghamshire – 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) – and you’d think both countries would be fighting over it, but they’re not. What they both want is Halai’b. Whereas Bir Tawil is mostly sand and rock, Halai’b is fertile, populated, on the Red Sea coast and ten times larger. Egypt currently occupies it, citing the 1899 boundary. Sudan disputes the claim, citing the 1902 amendment. Both disown Bir Tawil for the same reason.
The world’s most disputed territory is the Spratly Islands, an archipelago of 750 uninhabited islets in the South Pacific: 4 square kilometres (1½ square miles) of land spread over 425,000 square kilometres (164,000 square miles) of sea. Rich fishing grounds and potential oil and gas fields mean that six nations claim them: the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. Apart from Brunei, all maintain a military presence in the area. To strengthen their claim, the Philippines pay a rotating team of public sector employees to live on one of the Spratlys. It isn’t a popular posting: the charm of a tiny tropical rock that can be walked round in thirty minutes soon fades.
Which country is the river Nile in?
Despite its timeless association with Egypt, most of the Nile is in Sudan.
The Nile rises in Rwanda, in the Great Lakes area of Central Africa, and flows through Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Egypt, but the largest section traverses Sudan. The river’s two great tributaries – the Blue and White Niles – meet in Khartoum, the country’s capital.
Sudan is the largest country in Africa, covering 2,505,813 square kilometres (967,500 square miles), making it bigger than Western Europe and a quarter of the size of the USA. It is also the largest country in the Arab world. Because of its political and military precariousness, no one is quite sure what its current population is, but most estimates suggest 40 million, with four times as many living in the Arabic-speaking Muslim north as in the largely Christian south.
The northern Muslim population is descended from Arab invaders and the indigenous Nubian people, one of black Africa’s earliest civilisations. The name ‘Nubia’ comes from the Egyptian nbu, ‘gold’, as the region was famous for its gold mines. From the seventh century AD, waves of Arab invaders spread out from Damascus and Baghdad, establishing Islam throughout north-west Africa. The first Nubian Muslim ruler ascended to the throne in AD 1093 and northern Sudan has been a part of the Islamic world ever since.
‘Sudan’ means ‘black’ in Arabic. It comes from the Arabic bilad as-sudan meaning ‘land of the black people’ and southern and western Sudan contains a complex mix of almost 600 black African tribal groups, speaking over 400 different languages and dialects. Many of them are Christian, or practise traditional African religions. The Dinka – whose name means ‘the people’ and who are, at over a million strong, Sudan’s largest tribal group – practise both.
For over thirty years, the northern government and the southern tribes like the Dinka were locked in civil war. Ending in 1989, the war cost the lives of more than 2 million people and displaced another 4 million. It is estimated that 200,000 southern Sudanese have been forced into slavery in the north. Most of them are Dinka. In 2005 Southern Sudan was finally granted autonomy and this is being implemented by the United Nations.
In the meantime, the Northern Islamic government has been accused of genocide by using terrorist militias to destroy three tribal groups in the western region of Darfur. In 2008 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is the first time the court has brought charges against a serving head of state.
Sudan is 150th out of 182 nations on the UN’s human development index. One in five Sudanese lives on less than £1 a day. In the 2009 Happy Planet Index, which measures well-being and environmental impact, Sudan is ranked 121 out of 143, though this beats both Luxembourg and Estonia.
What was Cleopatra’s nationality?
She was Greek.
Cleopatra (literally meaning ‘renowned in her ancestry’) was a direct descendant of Ptolemy I (303–285 BC), the right-hand man to Alexander the Great. On Alexander’s death in 325 BC, Ptolemy’s loyalty was rewarded with the governorship o
f Egypt. Like Alexander, Ptolemy came from Macedon, north of Greece. The Macedonians had hereditary, all-powerful kings and despised the newfangled ideas of the south, crushing democracy in Athens in 322 BC. In keeping with his heritage, Ptolemy appointed himself Pharaoh of Egypt in 305 BC, founding a dynasty that would last 275 years.
The Ptolemaic court spoke Greek and behaved as an occupying foreign power, rather like the British in India. The Ptolemies, like all Pharoahs in Egypt, were also gods and they were a close-knit bunch. All the male heirs were called Ptolemy and the women were usually either Cleopatra or Berenice. Brothers and sisters often married each other, to keep things in the family and reinforce their aloofness from their subjects. This makes the Ptolemaic family tree almost impossible to follow.
For example, the Cleopatra we know is Cleopatra VII (69–30 BC), but her mother might have been either Cleopatra V or VI. Our Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII (117–51 BC), married his sister, who was also his cousin. It was a tiny gene pool: Cleopatra had only four great-grandparents and six (out of a possible sixteen) great-great-grandparents. The sculptures and coins that survive make clear that she wasn’t as beautiful as Shakespeare painted her, but nor did she have the classic Ptolemy look – fat with bulging eyes – that resulted from centuries of inbreeding. And, though no one knows exactly which of her relatives gave birth to her, ethnically she was pure Macedonian Greek.
Despite this, she identified strongly with Egypt. She became queen at eighteen and ruled the country for most of four decades. She was the first Ptolemy to learn the Egyptian language and had herself portrayed in traditional Egyptian dress. She was ruthless in removing any threats to her power, arranging for the murder of two siblings and plunging the country into civil war to take on the third, her brother (and husband), Ptolemy XIII.