5 places that will kill you in less than 5 days
It’s never a safe thing to be stranded, but where this happens in the world will directly impact your chances of survival. Certain places don’t care about your gear and training, and just being there will cause you to quickly meet your end. Here are 5 places that will kill you in less than 5 days.
1) The eastern Mauritania desert
Estimated survival time
Less than 2 days
This is one of the deserts in the world that few people are familiar with, but the eastern portion of the country has a vast desert that contains nothing, nothing at all. No water sources, no shelter, no trees, and no way of surviving.
The average daily temperatures can easily touch 40° C and if stranded here you’re not likely to last longer than 2 days. The surface of the ground and the dunes changes constantly with the wind, so remembering a point on the ground before night could see you looking at a completely new landscape in the morning.
2) The Amazon Jungle
Estimated survival time
Less than 5 days
The most famous place in the world to get stranded, the Amazon covers over 2 million square miles across 9 different countries and is home to more things that can kill you than anywhere else. Even though the Amazon is packed with all kinds of food, the problem is finding it while not getting stung or bit by something poisonous. Simple moving through the trees can see someone without equipment make no more than 1 mile a day, and water sources are often tainted with parasites and swarmed by mosquitoes.
The exact number of deaths that happen each year in the Amazon seems to be impossible to work out, as most of the deaths are from people who live locally and aren’t reported in the statistics of independent studies. Last year in 2018, 116 environmental activists died in the jungle, some from getting shot, but most from getting lost. If you think that going to the Amazon and walking a few miles through the jungle to tie yourself to a tree at a logging camp is a good idea, I can assure you, it isn’t.
The other long-term danger of getting stranded here is the chance of developing an infection. The smallest of scratches or insect bites can quickly turn bad in this constantly warm and humid climate, and it makes the perfect environment for the rapid onset of gangrene.
3) Antarctica
Estimated survival time
Less than 3 hours
The only place it’s possible for a human to survive here without their own equipment is in one of the research stations around the coast. As for the rest of the continent, it lacks everything a person would need to live, including any kind of tree or burnable plant matter, and no shelter of any kind. In the areas away from the coast there aren’t any animals, not even birds because of the complete lack of anything but snow.
The number one killer is the temperature which can get as low as -60° C in the more elevated parts of the center of the continent, with a more gentle -10° C on average around the coast. If stranded here without the proper expedition-class clothing you’d be dead from the cold in a couple of hours, and even if you somehow managed to keep warm you’d only starve to death soon after.
4) Snake island
Estimated survival time
The second you stop hiding in the surf and start walking around the island.
This island is located off the coast of Brazil and has received its name from the huge population of golden lance-head vipers that live there. The island covers around 430,000 m² and has roughly the same number of snakes, though it’s impossible to count them all. Certain places around the island have been found to contain over 100 snakes per 1m², in fact, the only place they don’t go is in the water.
If stranded here you would be forced to go into the trees to find drinking water, which would mean you’re guaranteed to encounter hundreds or thousands of less-than-friendly poisonous snakes.
5) Northern Greenland
Estimated survival time
3 to 5 days
This country located within the Arctic Circle isn’t one of the hardest places to survive due to its temperatures, which rarely get below -20°C in winter, but because of its vast glaciers and countless miles of nothing. For some comparison of how hard it is to survive here, Greenland has a population of just over 56,000 people and a surface area of over 2 million km², whereas Iceland is more than 20 times smaller but has a population of just over 336,000 people.
It says a lot that somewhere of similar climate has more than 7 times the population in less than a 20th of the space, but what makes Greenland so uninhabitable? The answer lies in its very unfortunate land layout, with most of the center of the island being covered by slowly moving glaciers. Most of the people who live in this country belong to various Inuit tribes, and more than a quarter of its entire population lives in the capital city. The severe lack of farmland and unsettled central glaciers make this country next to impossible to survive in without being supplied from the outside.
Another problem is moving between settlements due to the lack of roads. Settlements around the country are normally isolated from one another and supplied by boat or helicopter, both of which can only be done when the seas aren’t frozen or there isn’t a blizzard.
