Canada is a cold country, and the colder it gets, the more life-threatening it becomes. Heres what to expect when the temperature drops too low.
Though Canadian summers can be toasty, Canada is famously a winter nation, with some provinces routinely grappling with extreme cold and wind chill values making it feel like -40 or colder.
The human body is NOT designed to handle conditions like that, and when we talk about dangerous cold, we mean it.
“The short answer is no, it is not possible, and very probably never will be possible,” Professor Gary Bryant, Associate Dean (Physics) at RMIT University, told IFLScience. In fact, the human body – normally maintained at 37°C (98.6°F) – really can’t cope with much temperature change at all.
YOUR FROZEN BODY GETS MUMMIFIED
If it’s cold enough, and dry enough, and you die where no one can find you, your body will essentially become a frozen mummy.
And you can stay that way for a VERY long time. Take the man whose remains were discovered in the video below (warning: Graphic content):
That’s George Mallory, the Everest explorer who went missing in 1924, lost until a team found his body in 1999, with much of his exposed clothing ragged and torn but the flesh beneath remarkably intact and frozen solid. Encyclopedia Britannica says he likely died after a bad fall, and his body was buried where it was found, 8,400 m above sea level.
And in those conditions, a body can last even longer. In 2004, hikers on the border with Italy and Austria found the preserved bodies of three Austro-Hungarian soldiers, frozen in a glacier.
They’d been there since 1918, and bodies can be preserved even longer than that, like “Otzi the ice-man”, a Stone Age relic who was found in a glacier in Italy in 1991.
YOUR CORNEAS MAY FREEZE
If you spend a lot of time outside in that hellish cold combined with warmth-sapping winds, surely you must wonder: Could your eyeballs actually freeze?
In short exposures, no. This piece in the New York Daily News on outdoor running in cold weather notes your eyes will tear up, reducing the freezing point, and regular blinking will keep your peepers in working order.
It’s a whole other story if you’re a skier or snowmobiler, or anyone who has to spend a lot of time outdoors with the wind blowing in their face, and you forget to pack goggles.Content continues below
Princeton University says forcing your eyes open in strong winds and extreme cold with no protection from extreme cold can, in fact, cause your cornea to freeze.
This actually causes people to drop out of grueling cross-country Arctic races like Alaska’s Iditarod, and even when re-warming the area (which this article says can be done with a compress or warm hand), you still have to deal with momentary blurred vision. It’s even possible for contact lenses to freeze to the eyeballs.
The eyes are usually thawed by the time the victim gets to a physician, and any damage can usually heal in days or weeks, but severe cases could result in tissue loss requiring restorative surgery.
Remember your goggles, outdoor enthusiasts.
Can you freeze your body and come back to life? – Shannon N. Tessier
FAQ
At what temperature does the human body freeze solid?
Do humans have a freezing point?
What happens if a human freezes?
Can human skin freeze?
Did a woman survive being frozen solid?
Decades Ago, A Woman Survived Being ‘Frozen Solid’. Here’s The Science : ScienceAlert Decades Ago, A Woman Survived Being ‘Frozen Solid’. Here’s The Science Early one New Year’s Eve morning in Minnesota, back in 1980, a man named Wally Nelson stumbled across the body of his friend, lying in the snow just a few meters from his door.
Can a brain freeze cause a stroke?
Brain freeze is a brief but intense pain in the front part of your head. It occurs when you eat, drink or breathe something extremely cold. Brain freeze can’t cause brain damage like stroke. That pain is either caused by stimulation of the trigeminal nerve in the roof of your mouth or by cold air in your sinuses resulting in an abrupt contraction of the blood vessels in your forehead (similar to the way migraines are caused).
How do blood cells survive a frozen corpse?
“Every cell is different. For example, with red blood cells you’ve basically got to plunge it straight into liquid nitrogen for it to survive, whereas with white blood cells you have to cool it really, really slowly to get the same effect. Will we ever bring frozen corpses back to life?
Could we ever reanimate a frozen corpse?
This video breaks down the chemistry of cryogenic freezing and if it’s realistic to think we could ever reanimate a frozen corpse. Cryonics is the low-temperature freezing (usually at −196 °C or −320.8 °F or 77.1 K) and storage of a human corpse or severed head, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future.