Word: colds
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...talked about the positives that have come out of cold. But there certainly are other parts of the book where, for instance, in the blizzard of January 1888, you have cows' hot breath literally turning into balls of ice around their heads. Yeah, so the question is, if I'm such a fan of cold, why is there so much in the book that's sort of negative about cold...
...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...
...Arctic explorer, as you point out, needs a phenomenal number of calories each day. Oh, 5,000 or 6,000 calories a day, sure. With the cold in the Arctic, you do have a really huge calorie need. Even just dug in and trying to survive, you would need probably 3,000-plus calories a day. (See pictures of frozen Greenland...
...talk about cold-weather-related inventions. Like the bicycle, for instance. That's my favorite one. That grew out of the Year Without Summer [1816]. There was quite a lot of volcanic activity for several years prior to that, and it created a cloud of dust high up in the atmosphere. The earth cooled very quickly, at least in the northern hemisphere. And crops started to fail. So [German inventor Karl Drais] saw that it was more and more expensive to feed a horse, and he came up with what was originally called a Draisine. It was really a scooter...