I just found out there’s this guy at work who is fascinated with Alaska. He mostly grew up in Texas..Actually, that figures…I’ll have to get into the Alaska\/Texas thing later. My Alaskan readers know what I mean. Anyway, he forwarded me this correspondence he’d had with a North Pole resident about the effects of cold:<\/p>\n
>Off-the-topic question for you: After it’s 64 below, when it warms up
\n>to, say, 30 below, can you tell the difference? I just ask because
\n>it’s something I’ve wondered for a long time but am not likely to
\n>find out by personal experience in Houston, TX. And where in Alaska
\n>are you where it would get so cold?<\/p>\n
>ANSWER
\n>Actually your question is most welcome – I love this place
\n>and it is kinda fun to talk about it. Yes, 30 below is a major
\n>improvement. I can drive without the transmission fluid stiffening
\n>up, I can breathe outside without coughing when I first go out, all
\n>sorts of goodies. The teens here start wearing shorts again when it
\n>gets up to 15 to 20 below. We’re all a bit nuts, I guess.
\n>
\n>I live out of Fairbanks in a little community that was named North
\n>Pole because of the extreme cold, not the chubby guy in the red fur
\n>suit…though fur suits do look good this time of year. And chubby
\n>works out ok here for 8 months of the year…everyone but the teens
\n>has so many layers of clothing on, you can’t tell.
\n>
\n>Good story – when I first moved up here years ago, someone told me
\n>that once it got below 60 below, you could take a cup of boiling
\n>coffee outside and toss the liquid up into the air – and it would
\n>turn to ice before it hit the ground. I tried that a couple times in
\n>’89, when it was below 70 below, and it just isn’t true. It turns
\n>into a cloud and floats away…. don’t know how cold it was then,
\n>even our thermometers stop at 70 below, and mine was bottomed out big
\n>time.<\/p>\n
Well, you can’t use BOILING water…But that’s pretty neat, that it completely disappeared into mist….<\/p>\n
Me and Chris tried it when it got to 40 below, with a cup of just regular cold tap water. What happened was, the droplets that separated themseves from the main body of water DID freeze before it hit the ground. The main section of water didn’t freeze that fast and splatted on the snow like a rorschach.<\/p>\n
Naturally, Chris and I thought it might need a little more TIME to freeze before it hit the ground. We thought it might freeze entirely if we threw it off the balcony on the second floor. But the distance of the fall worked against us. When we tried to gather the evidence of the experiment on the snow below, it was hard to tell which was the ice from our cup of water and which was just regular ice.<\/p>\n
She’s right about the breathing thing. When it’s really cold, if you breathe through your mouth, your air passage doesn’t have enough time to warm the air sufficiently before it reaches your lungs. It hits the little pink cells in your lungs like a punch to the gut; you have to cough. Of course, you can breathe through your nose, but the moisture in the nasal passage instantly freezes on the nose hairs. And it’s still not enough time to warm the air. You’ll cough and sputter until your lungs get used to the cold and then you can breathe.<\/p>\n
You should wear a scarf over your mouth, to breathe through. It creates a little pocket of air warmed by your breath and keeps your warmer. Of course, the scarf gets a layer of frost and ice over the part you’re breathing through. And your eylashes frost up.<\/p>\n
Of course, what it does to cars is another subject entirely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just found out there’s this guy at work who is fascinated with Alaska. He mostly grew up in Texas..Actually, that figures…I’ll have to get into the Alaska\/Texas thing later. My Alaskan readers know what I mean. Anyway, he forwarded … Continue reading