5 strange and scary facts about cold weather

Winter can be one of the most beautiful times of the year, but it is also the deadliest. Cold weather can kill you much faster than hot weather can, and developed countries like the United States still see twice as many people die in the cold of winter than in the heat of summer. Here are the 5 strange and scary facts about cold weather and what it’s truly capable of.

1) The earth can’t start a new ice age, because we are still in one

Over the last 2.4 billion years, the earth has left evidence that it’s experienced 5 major ice ages, which have glacial periods that last anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000 years each. During these ice ages, the world will go through glacial and interglacial periods where the earth warms up and the ice recedes enough for things to look “normal”, but inevitably goes back to freezing again. The current ice age started around 3 million years ago and was at its peak around 18,000 years ago, and is often referred to as “ending” about 11,000 years ago which is when modern-day humans began to thrive as a species.

The thing is that it didn’t actually end, and instead just went into one of its inter-glacial periods where the earth warms up enough for the ice to retreat to the poles of the earth. If the natural cycle of the planet continues as it has been for hundreds of millions of years, then the earth is guaranteed to go back into a time that saw ice sheets up to 2 miles thick covering entire countries, while the sea levels will plummet and reveal new lands previously covered in water. Fortunately, these things happen very slowly, and it would take thousands if not tens of thousands of years for the world to phase back into a glacial period of the current ice age we live in.

2) There’s no such thing as “cold”

When people claim they are cold, they are referring to the uncomfortable feeling they experience from being in an environment that lacks the necessary Kelvin levels for them to maintain an average body temperature, which may sound odd but let me explain. The coldest anything can possibly get is called absolute zero which is -273.15 °C, but there theoretically isn’t a maximum temperature. The reason for this is that at absolute zero, the bonds between atoms and molecules contain zero energy, with Kelvin being the scientific scale of measuring temperature based on energy.

At zero Kelvin, any material would shatter like glass because the bonds holding things together would be at zero flexibility. When people feel “cold” there isn’t actually anything there for them to physically feel, and it’s merely a change in the energy levels of whatever is making up the environment they are in. Your body warns you of danger and damage in the form of pain, and when you feel cold, it’s nothing more than your body’s warning reaction to being in an environment capable of reducing your body’s average Kelvin level to one that would cause it to stop working. But saying “This environment has lowered my body’s average Kelvin levels to one that causes discomfort” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “I’m cold”.

3) The most dangerous weather on earth is a blizzard

If you’re stuck in the middle of the desert in direct sunlight, it can still take over a day to kill you, but being stuck in the wrong blizzard could off you in as little as 10 minutes. In the most extreme case, such as being in a -50 °C blizzard with 50 mph winds while wearing nothing but a t-shirt and jeans, you would be lucky if you lasted for more than 5 minutes before passing out and freezing, making it the fastest way to die in nature from the weather alone.

The coldest weather ever recorded on earth was -89.2 °C, and was taken at the Vostok research base in Antarctica in 1983. A blizzard of this temperature would be fatal to anyone who wasn’t in a specially made vehicle or building, as rubber freezes at -70 °C there wouldn’t be anything that humans could possibly build that would allow someone to be out in the open at that temperature.

4) If you suddenly feel warm while out in extreme cold for to long, you’re in big trouble

The condition known as frostbite is where the outer layers of the skin freeze, and when this happens the tissue dies and will be shed when thawing occurs. Freezing living tissue causes it to expand slightly, which in turn causes the cell walls to rupture. This is the reason that the tissue cannot be saved after being completely frozen because the tissue dies the second the cells that make it up are destroyed.

(The effects of frostbite after thawing, you can clearly see which parts of the skin were either partially or completely frozen)

The first stages of frostbite are called frostnip, which is where the outer layers of affected skin start to freeze but haven’t actually frozen yet. Frostnip can be very uncomfortable, but it isn’t dangerous in itself and can be easily treated, though if it isn’t seen early enough it will go on to turn into frostbite. When the tissue freezes, it also freezes the nerves which are telling you it’s cold in the first place. When you start to get cold your nerves are working well enough to allow you to feel exactly how cold it is, but when you start to go numb and don’t feel cold anymore, it’s because you have reached a level of cold that has already numbed your nerves to the point of no feeling, and when they are frozen, you won’t feel the cold anymore and will start to feel warmer and stop shivering as much.

5) Cold weather causes the driest air on earth, and the biggest desert is in Antarctica

In environments of extreme cold, any moisture in the air instantly freezes and falls to the ground in the form of frost. This means that every time you breathe out, the moisture will be quickly removed from the air, and you’ll be breathing air back in with 0% humidity. This may not sound that bad, but it causes water to be removed from your body at a rate close to what you’d lose in a hot desert.

(One of Antarctica’s many mountain ranges)

As for deserts, the largest on earth by a long shot is located in central Antarctica and covers an area of 5.5 million square miles, and for some size comparison, the United States and Canada each cover an area that’s approximately 3.8 million square miles. It’s classed as a desert because it never receives any rainfall, and all the snow there is blown into the sky by huge blizzards before falling to the ground again. Even though it contains over 90% of the world’s supply of fresh water, the continent of Antarctica only receives about 2 inches of fresh snowfall every year.