Word: colds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Driving snow. Subzero temperatures. Frozen toes. That all might sound pretty good in the dog days of August, but Bill Streever's new book, Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places - part history, part biology, part ode to the natural world - chronicles temperatures few people would ever hope to encounter. Streever, an Anchorage-based biologist and chair of the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel, talked to TIME about polar exploration, how cold spurred the invention of the bicycle and what it feels like to freeze to death. (See pictures of the Arctic...
What made you decide to write this book? Living here in Alaska, cold is pretty much present all the time. Whether it's actually cold outside or not, you see signs of cold everywhere. The street in front of my house, for example, is very badly frost-heaved, so it has big waves in the street. Looking in the mountains that I can see outside my window, there is very obvious glacial erosion that creates these beautiful U-shaped alpine valleys. And the wildlife around here, of course, is all adapted to the cold. What better topic to write about...
...tell many interesting and in some ways terrifying anecdotes about explorers and the troubles they ran into with cold. Are there any that stick out to you as your favorites? One of my favorite patterns that I think you can see in the Arctic explorers in the 1800s and early 1900s was a very dignified approach to everything they did, even in dying. They were oftentimes amazingly collected in the notes they left behind in their journals. [Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon] Scott is one of the better examples of that. On his return from the South Pole, he was only...
Particularly because of how it feels to freeze to death. You write that by the end, many people are ripping at their neck and tearing their clothes off. That's sometimes called paradoxical undressing. As people are becoming very cold and their muscles are failing, there seems to be this feeling that they can't breathe anymore. So they start tearing off clothes. It doesn't happen in every case, and certainly didn't seem to happen to Scott. It seems to be more prevalent with people who are freezing to death very quickly - say, a mountaineer who's lost...
...first, I felt betrayed: This high-quality bounty had been close at hand all along. Instead, I’d been stuck where they served turkey cold cuts—straight from the sandwich bar, but topped with a little garnish—as an entr?...