Trapped in the arctic circle

How long before you should eat your friends?

The Arctic Circle is an area within a circle of latitude that is 66° north of the Equator. It includes 7 countries which are Canada, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark but only with their territory of Greenland, and the United States but only with the state of Alaska.

The further north you go the colder it gets, with the inland areas of Norway having a winter temperature as low as -40°C. Anywhere within the Arctic Circle isn’t somewhere you want to get stranded, especially at night or in areas with high wolf populations. Fortunately, you are more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine than you are by a wolf, and they have always been a second to the cold on the threat scale.

What happens if you are trapped in an area of extreme cold, and what are your chances of survival?

Assuming you are in a position where you won’t freeze to death within the first few minutes, like being stuck in the cabin below for example, then you could survive for about 3 weeks with no food, at which point everyone would most likely consume whoever died first.

Do people often eat each other in survival situations?

Often, no, but it has happened on plenty of occasions, and almost always in cold weather areas. Here are a few of the most famous survival stories of all time where people had no choice but to eat the dead to keep living.

The Donner Party

Maybe the most well-known story of cannibalism ever. The Donner party consisted of several families and lone settlers who tried to make the trip from the Midwest to California in the year 1846. Every year, thousands of people form a huge chain of caravans and walk across the country to settle in California, a trip that is normally undertaken at the end of summer. The Donner party and those with them left too late in the year, and tried to make up for lost time by taking a shortcut they heard about at one of the forts along the route.

(The route taken by the Donner party who got so close to their destination before everything went wrong)

They made their way into the mountains but it wasn’t as easy as they were told, and progress was very slow. When high up in the mountain range, their path became blocked by snowfall and they were forced to wait out the winter until the route cleared. This was completely unplanned and no one had enough food to last more than a couple of weeks. They built three small and leaky cabins but quickly ran out of food when the blizzards hit, forcing them to go hungry until the first person died. The second half of the time they were trapped there, they survived entirely on human flesh, and there were accusations of people being killed to provide food.

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571

In 1972, The Uruguayan Rugby team was flying to one of their matches when their plane crashed in the Andes mountain range. There were 45 people onboard when it went down, and only 16 of them made it out of there, but after a long and gruesome ordeal that has since been made into a movie. Five of the people onboard died in the crash itself, leaving the other 40 people, many of whom were badly wounded, to survive high up in the mountains in freezing temperatures.

(Some of the survivors trapped in their camp up the Andes mountains)

They were trapped there for over two months and had nothing more on the plane than a standard flight’s worth of food. Some of the more badly injured amongst them couldn’t survive without treatment and died, giving the others no choice but to make use of them as food. Over two months and ten days, 29 people died from the cold or accidents when trying to find a way out, and most of these were eaten by the others.

Sir John Franklin’s Arctic Expedition

In 1845, an ambitious captain called Sir John Franklin set sail with the goal of finding a route through the Northwest Passage. Whoever found a way through would be able to open up a new shipping route to the world and would go down in history as a captain to be remembered. He set sail with two ships and headed past Greenland trying to find somewhere he could turn west and follow the Canadian coastline. When passing through the Victoria Strait in what is now known as Nunavut territory, both ships became lodged in the ice. They were dragged for just over a year before they ran out of supplies and made the decision to walk several hundred miles to the coast.

(An old illustration of the two ships taken on the Franklin expedition)

There were 129 crew onboard the two ships, but when they abandoned their vessels and began to walk, they had already lost around 2 dozen men. What happened next is unknown, other than they began to walk south along the ice sheet towards the Canadian mainland, but there is little evidence to say exactly how they died. Only a few of the 129 bodies were ever found, and the ones that did have marks of what appeared to be evidence of butchering. Multiple cuts in certain areas of the thigh bones suggested the carving of meat, and with the running out of supplies, before they even left their ships, it only supports the theory many of them ate each other.

How likely are people to eat each other?

Assuming someone didn’t have the option to call for help and didn’t know where you were, it would take about 3 weeks of no food before people starved to death. Most people do not know what true hunger is, and the feeling of not eating for 3 or 4 days is something you have to experience to understand. With nothing else to do and constantly looking at something you “could” eat, it would only take until everyone’s hunger and will to survive overtook their ethics.

Humans don’t naturally want to eat each other and there have been many people who died in survival situations where cannibalism was present because they refused to eat. Not that it would be the first choice of a sane and normal person, but when anybody becomes hungry enough it will at the very least be considered. This is only something people have the option of doing in climates below freezing, and the reason there are next to no cases of cannibalism in survival stories that take place in hot climates is mostly due to the rapid rate of decomposition of the bodies. Unless you ate someone right away after the initial crash, you wouldn’t have the option to by the time you became hungry enough to eat human meat.