The biggest dangers of the Arctic Circle

The Arctic Circle is an area that surrounds the North Pole and is generally classed as anything above a line of latitude that runs 66.5° north of the equator. It also happens to be the most dangerous area of the world to be stranded in and can kill you faster than any other climate. That’s not to say that the desert and jungle aren’t without their life-threatening diseases, creatures, and temperatures, but in terms of how fast you can die just from simply being there in the wrong conditions, the Arctic’s extreme weather can make you pass out in less than 5 minutes.

Here are a few of the biggest dangers of the Arctic Circle and exactly why this area of the world requires more planning and equipment to visit than any other climate.

Polar bears

The list just wouldn’t be complete without a polar bear now, would it? I know they are super cute and look friendly enough, but they just so happen to be the only mammal on Earth that actively hunts humans for food. Sure a crocodile or hungry tiger might kill and eat a human if they had the chance, but they don’t go out actively seeking them for food like the polar bear does, and after the cold, this makes them the single biggest danger of the Arctic circle.

Fortunately, polar bear attacks are extremely rare with around 20 deaths being recorded over the last 150 years. This number is probably due to people having guns by the time they made it to the regions where polar bears can be found, and they aren’t exactly hard to spot. If you are unlucky enough to be attacked by one then you’re pretty much done for as they don’t let up like bears do. When black and grizzly bears attack they normally leave you alone if you play dead and just want to make sure you’re not a threat anymore, whereas polar bears are more interested in slapping you into several pieces so you’re easier to eat.

Flash Freezing

Flash freezing is when something becomes frozen in a very short amount of time in high winds. If you are caught in a blizzard at anything lower than -30°C with winds above 50mph then you are in the danger zone of flash freezing. This condition will see the smallest and least circulated areas of the body affected first, with the nose, cheeks, ears, fingers, and toes being the most common to experience the affliction.

(This is frostnip, the stage before it turns into frostbite and something has completely frozen. It only takes a couple of minutes in the right conditions for this to happen)

The first stage of having a part of your body freeze is known as frost-nip, which is when the very outer layers of your skin freeze, but the underlying fat and muscle layers remain unharmed, which allows for full recovery of the affected part. Frostbite is when it freezes and kills the tissue, but flash-freezing skips these first two stages and provides enough cold to freeze the tissue all the way through. It can take up to an hour to have something small like your nose completely frozen to the point where it will die, but in the unlikely event that you are in regular clothing with your arms and head exposed during a blizzard, you’d probably pass out from having part of your brain flash frozen in under 5 minutes.

Snow Bridges

A snow bridge is an area of snow that has formed over the crevasse of a split glacier. Since glaciers are always moving, even though it is exceptionally slow, they occasionally break apart and form cracks miles long and hundreds of feet deep. When this happens snow starts to build up with the wind and forms a bump at the top of whichever side the wind’s blowing from, and after a long enough time it will build up so much that it will cover the whole gap and start to level out as the wind blows.

(A small snow bridge starting to form over a stream)

Since they can cover a crevasse for several miles and visibility generally isn’t that great in the Arctic, they are often impossible to spot as bumps and snow dunes form all the time in the far north of the circle. You won’t know one is there until you step on nothing but lightly packed snow covering a fall possibly up to half a mile deep, giving you very little chance of survival. As far as I am aware there has only been one successful rescue from someone who’s fallen through a glacial snow bridge, and that’s only because he was lucky enough to land on a small ledge a short distance from the top.

The mornings

There is nothing quite as beautiful as seeing the sunrise over a snow-covered forest first thing in the morning, it’s just a shame this is also the time of day you can lose body heat the fastest. Mornings are always cold and even more so in the circle, which doesn’t help after you’ve just been asleep and had your body temperature raised for several hours. Sleeping makes you warmer and even if you’re cold as you sleep, you still warm up more than if you were awake, and in a poorly made survival shelter this will be the most dangerous time of the day.

When you wake up in extreme cold you are supposed to stay in a warm environment until you’ve properly “woken up”, at which point your body temperature will be stable. The vast majority of the time when someone is found dead after getting stranded in the Arctic they are in a position or rest, normally laying in their sleeping bag or where ever they slept. This is much more common than finding a body that was trying to travel, and even though there are many factors as to why people are found like this, those plummeting morning temperatures at a time when your body is at its warmest certainly don’t help.

Frostbite

The single biggest danger of the Arctic Circle is Frostbite, because most people don’t even realize they have until it’s too late. Frostbite is when part of your body becomes gradually frozen until the point the tissue dies. When living tissue freezes it expands, and when a living cell expands it ruptures the cell wall and kills it, removing any chances to heal since it’s already dead. To start with you’ll just feel very cold, then you’ll feel extreme, almost painful cold in the affected areas, normally the fingers and toes, but after a while, the pain gets better and you just feel a little stiff.

At the point when it starts to feel less painful you’re in trouble and need to take immediate action because this is when the outer layers of your skin have frozen and the cold is starting to freeze your fat and muscle layers. Skin can repair itself and will only result in some painful peeling of the outer layers, but fat and muscle are another story. Meat will begin to decompose when it dies and this starts to happen at the point of thawing, but on the bright side, frostbite is almost never fatal. The body cuts off circulation to the affected part and seals itself off from it until it eventually just drops off like a scab.