Human Rate Of Freezing In A "Waterless" Place

It depends upon the people. Glaswegians are somewhat more immune than others, for example.

When one lives in such Northern Reaches, away from the tempering effects of the Gulf Stream, I suppose near anything can happen.

Those Glaswegians are "A Rare Breed" (note the reference to a Jimmy Stewart movie about Hereford bull named Vindicator).

Even in a zero K environment, TD is finite, and therefore instant freezing is impossible.

Yeah, I remember the scene where the door iced up instantly. For heat to transfer that fast, I figured the outside temperature had to be at least several hundred degrees below absolute zero.

Its especially bad in your area where a "calm day" has a wind speed of 20 MPH.

Living in Iowa, as a student , with 30 below being real, and a high of minus 7 for the week, we used to strip down to shorts and t-shirts when the temps hit 40, and play flag football... Downside being the strips of land in the shade that had not defrosted or thawed, making for some nasty raspberries, when slipping and falling.. 40 degrees was a summer day.. Until it hit 110 !!!!

Sounds like Delta Pier in February. BTDT.

I have been out in the oil patch in -30ºF. That is actually not too bad, as we know how to layer up for that. I agree with you. Houston on a January day down by the ship channel at 32ºF was far worse.

As I understand, freezing to death is supposed to be the easiest way to go - you get sleepy and never wake up. Of course, we really don't have anyone who can confirm this.

Only in Hollywood does someone freeze that quickly.

hey now,... haven't you ever heard of 'life imitating art'?

I did not consider that film 'art' although I am open to the idea of 'life imitating wasted digital celluloid' or 'life imitating sitting in a theatre for two hours and four minutes wondering why I wasted ten bucks on this tripe.' The popcorn was good, tho.

We did do (At minus 30 degrees), all of the things we were passed on, by upper classmen, such as throwing pitchers of water out, and watching them freeze mid air (They did), but I would suggest the volume or mass of the target, with the ambient temperature, is the most critical starting point for such experiments..

The only ones to freeze faster in Hollywood are the conservative actors, once they receive "the cold shoulder". Unfortunate, that. All this does upset the Balance of the Force.

Insta-Freeze from Lyn-Door® Industries, is guaranteed to reduce an Augenblick, to just Augen-.

Actually, to Insta-Freeze anyone or anything would require temporary suspension of the Laws of Physics and Chemistry to the point where C_p⇒0 for all materials except the refrigerant which would have to have C_p⇒∞, and the heat transfer coefficients as well.

I wonder what the magnetic field would have to be? Infinity? Thinking in terms of state degeneracy here. (Oh wait, that only exists in Californica.)

WHAT!?

I'm shocked. Stunned to think that a movie couldn't be anything but scientifically accurate. Particularly this documentary film of a day in the not too distant future.

The next thing you'll be telling me is that North Korea has figured out how to measure hydration levels without any scientific support or evidence.

The Children's Blizzard chronicles the impacts of, and the meteorological science behind, the Great Blizzard of 1888, during which many froze to death.

That sounds like an episode I recall from "Little House on the Prairie", and yes, freezing to death in a blizzard is horrific at best. Right up there with being buried in a fire ant mound, I suppose.

Death by being burned at the stake (morbid as it is) happens 10 times more quickly, one does not feel anything once the nerve endings beneath skin are overheated, and the first breath of fire wipes out the need for another breath. Almost merciful by comparison, never mind the cruelty that could conceive of these as applied capital punishments.

Was this the theory of the atmosphere being pulled off of the planet for period of time, that allowed this? Just asking..

That would have killed everything had something like that actually happened, but then what mechanism would explain the planet's atmosphere disappearing and then being restored to its original pressure and composition?

Was this the theory of the atmosphere being pulled off of the planet for period of time,

that may have been a planet sized object that hit earth called Theia....

Not in the time frame the woolly mammoths disappeared which was very recent. The Moon is 4.53 billion years old and did not exist prior to the hypothetical collision. But while most mammoths died out ~10,000 years ago, one tiny population endured on isolated Wrangel Island until 1650 BCE.

no not in the time frame.

I believe the supposed basis of the movie was something like a giant (global warming caused) vortex, way past an F5 tornado, that literally acted like a giant chiller that started out with very cold leading compression wave from the dumping of the polar vortex in 5-space (or something like that).

Yes, about as plausible as Armageddon and Deep Impact, two other forgettable movies. Entrusting Hollywood to portray science correctly is about as promising as entrusting The Daily Mail to convey actual facts.

-400°C...

Wind chill...

What wind?

I once spent 6 months in Wabush Labrador (Iron Ore of Canada). There were two deaths during my stay, both were postal workers. The temperature was -45 deg. F. and the wind was blowing. It was a very dry cold,you could have skin blisters, and you had to cover your nose and mouth (as advised by the locals) to survive.

Both workers were found within 100 yards of their stranded cars.

So it does not take long.

That's really something!

That, sir, is just one of the reasons why I admire Iowans so much! Great communities, and true community action - probably did not require a community organizer from Chicago either.

Interesting to think about. What comes to my remembrance is the short story To Build a Fire by Jack London (the later version).

-75ºF - where your spit will freeze and "crackle" before it hits the ground!

Blue Norther - from 64ºF to 25ºF in a few hours. Yikes!

It's been unseasonably cool here in central Texas and so I can imagine how chilly it must be up there where you are. I rather enjoy it, actually - I dread Texas summers.

Central Texas summers are merciless! Houston is easy by comparison, since there, all one has to do is change shirts every hour on the hour.

In Austin, you merely suffer, unable to evaporate sweat, with temperatures 30 degree F above Houston many days. I love the apparent size of moon rise near Austin, compared to Lubbock, it really seems far nearer. That and the bat flights on the Colorado River.

Austin, is best played at night, yet the heat at times borders on just above miserable.

Clearly you've been to Austin.

Speaking of bats, when I first came here I was sitting outside at Pappadeaux's waiting for my table and noticed the lack of bugs around the lights. I asked and they explained it was due of the large bat population. "How nice of them to eat all the bugs!," I thought. Learnt later that the largest bat colony in the world, Braken Cave, is located near San Antonio. An estimated 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats live there.

Yes, and apparently, every single one of them a potential carrier of rabies. Bats and skunks are to be avoided like the plague. Even if Dog made them with "jobs" to do.

I dunno, the more humans I meet, the more I like my dog - and I don't even have a dog.

If I remember correctly, there was a fellow in Texas , in the 1800's that built huge bat houses , and they were the most effective means of reducing the mosquito populations. Plaque was one of the big killers. His Bat-hotels went out of business when the chemical companies sprung up with new, and "better " products. Don't know how to control rabies, or if all bats species carry them..??

And all this time, I thought it was the purple martins that kept mosquitoes down.

How many died of the "plaque" back then? Did they not have Crest and a toothbrush?

BTW I don't think mosquitoes carry Bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis). Fleas do. I suspect fleas like bat blood as much as a dog or human.

Have fun and you won't build up internal cranial pressure.

Now it's the prairie dogs that are the plague threat

Do you know or can name one of the more dangerous commodities shipped through a DOT designation? Three guesses.

my first guess.... Nuclear waste?

I company I did work for made the containment vessels for the off loading of spent fuel from the Super Carriers in Hawaii.

Those containers are near indestructible.

Keeping trying, although the first two guesses were pretty deadly ones.

cold fussion

Palladium.

I would guess chlorine and ammonia are pretty high on the list.

Sarin gas? I would presume it is classified as a DOT Poison A

The top-10 hazardous materials weighted by impact casualties are:

Gasoline, chlorine, diesel fuel, propylene, fireworks, LPG, carbon dioxide (refrigerated liquid), argon (refrigerated liquid), propane.

Cheeseburgers from McDonalds drive through?

There you go. I don't know how people eat that stuff. I reckon people who eat it all the time are slowly embalming themselves.

I passed a truck carrying a BIG tank marked 'Hydrogen Peroxide.' I don't know what concentration it was - it didn't say - but if it was fairly concentrated I can only imagine what would happen if that stuff started to nucleate. They must have to keep those tanks insanely clean.

Hot (200 - 250ºF) ammonium nitrate solution (not as dangerous as many people think, though)?

You are correct. It referred to Malaria, of which thee were confirmed 1 million cases in the South in the early 1900's. A good read is one of Dr. Campbell, and his Mitchell's Lake Bat tower, near San Antonio. Now there was one persistent fellow.

Space has no water and what happens their - oh it has no pressure either...and yes super cold air (relative humidity is another topic) will snap freeze you.
Sorta like at Dome A just before the winter sets in on a windy day.

No, space will not 'snap' freeze you as you freeze only as fast as you can radiate heat away - not a very efficient process unless you have a large surface-area-to-volume ratio, which humans don't. Consequently you freeze comparatively slowly in space. Being immersed in something very cold - liquid nitrogen, for example - is much more efficient at removing heat.

No, you might not "snap" freeze, but you would far surpass your normal ebullience.

Water in your body (as exposed to the vacuum of space), would instantly assume flash boiling that would quickly lower the temperature even faster than heat transfer.

The flash boiling would explode every cell in the body. I would not bother with the details of the gradual cooling after that.

I think by that point the dread of freezing to death in a waterless place would be moot, yes. Assuming the human doesn't undergo a 'phase change,' snap-freezing by radiative heat transfer is a slow way to go.

Deleted. Wishing I could just delete within the time given for editing.

They do like to keep our posts around, I'm guessing to be used against us in the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse.

The measure of faith used to be stronger it appears. As an older man, today was one of the days when I can say, "If I live I live, and if I die I die. Hoka hey" (Let's roll).

I just don't want my soul to awaken to the cold of a water less place.

I'll go along with the fingers and ankles, but the heat exchanges due to respiration do not amount to much. The mouth and nose are amazingly efficient warmers and moisturisers of incoming air to protect the lungs, but the loss of calories in warm moisture-laden breath is too trivial to bother about. Hot air has been used in the resuscitation of hypothermic victims, but it appears to be effective only because it specifically warms the brain (the respiratory passage runs not far from the base of the brain). Its calorie content is no good for warming up 70kg.

I will surmise that the the survivable maximum is a lot longer than 30 seconds, but there's nothing wrong with staying well on the right side of safety.

Your title "Human Rate Of Freezing In A "Waterless" Place" is interesting...

And now its going off topic and is going to get a bit morbid.

My girlfriend is a documentary nut... probably why I like her... she watch a documentary on forensics on what is called a body farm.... I think this was it...

where they learn what happens to a body when and what happens to a body decomposes and what time the discomposure is at as well as different conditions.... they may have something there about freezing.... but I doubt it...

Just thought I post something a little out of the ordinary.

I used to read portions of the Journal of Forensic Medicine "in my spare time" in my days as a criminalist-toxicologist (crime laboratory for Texas Department of Public Safety for those in Rio Linda). I have seen quite a few articles on "the body farm", and there is not just one. It seems morbid, but is actually a way people can make one last contribution to science. It is one way the "bug" people can tell how long one has been resting in such a place. Also, forensic examiners (medical examiners) can focus their determinations of the cause of death more accurately, long after death has occurred.

It is still harder to determine (basically) CoD the longer a body has been deceased, especially in an exposed environment where animal scavengers may remove portions from the location, etc. Bones get nibbled on, or carried away, etc.

oh god,.. you made me think of something...

Back in the 70's, we had a family that bought a farm that we rented... after about a year, he (I'll call Jim) was telling me this.

That another neighbor, who we thought was kinda peculiar always invited their family over to watch movies... Well finally he accepted... not knowing what kind of movies,... he thought it be a nice surprise...

Well it was a surprise all right... the movies... were local crimes scenes (murder/suicide) from the past 30-40 years... I guess he was the police department specialist for archiving them... and was quite proud of it.

Needless to say, they were surprised... I myself,... couldn't stop myself from laughing when he told me.

on a side note,... I was also surprised and how many murder/suicides occurred in our rural neck of the woods.

"And here's old Larry, whom we mostly found out behind the tool shed, the pump house, and the barn, except for a trail of bits 'n' bobs leading from the kitchen. And looky here, if you work the tendons in his arm just so, you can get his hand to flip my partner 'the bird'. That always gets 'im going! hehehe"

ROTDDFLMFAOA10XNS!!! and in reference to Phoenix mention of the "family home evening movies", that reminds one of a quiet dinner at Hannibal Lecter's house.

Would you care for some Fava beans with that puree, how about those guts? In or out?

Well Jim mentioned the movie "Deliverance"... that recently played... the situation rattle them... and understandable so. He did mentioned to the neighbor how could you do that?

The back story is; Jim was degreed in material sciences, as well as a manufacturing engineer and he worked at the local shipyard, and this neighbor was actually Jim's boss. I think this neighbor was worried about his own job.... it wasn't long after, Jim was left go.

And this Neighbor, I worked at the same shipyard years later, and I was told that on softball league, one guy also worked under this neighbor, who was a good player, replaced this neighbor on the ball team position where the neighbor was then benched.

Well, when this happened, this Neighbor moved this good player to second shift so he'd missed the games, and the neighbor can get his old spot back and play...

Unfortunately... when he (the ball player) told me this.... I laughed also saying something to the affect of "There's a moral to that story,... but I just can't quite place it".

I should have put names to this neighbor and ball player, be easier to follow.

Ssssh - I'm still sketching the relationships diagram ....

K,... lol

I don't know where you live (and I'm not sure I wanna know), but you've got some interesting neighbours!

Gotta have a sense of humor

You didnt bring your wife either? Its indeed colder.

You're up early.

I guess. 7am is not that early here.

I slept early too at 2:30am

No rest for the wicked.

OK, enough three guesses about hazardous cargo. In connection with fleas, bats, skunks, etc. -- one of the most dangerous, yet permitted transportable commodities is

Yersinia Pestis, the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death. It has been actually used to more than decimate overrunning rodent populations is some localities, however, I can't for the life of me see how in hell transporting this under any circumstance could be deemed safe, prudent, advisable, or permissable, even though I recall seeing a DOT classification for it back before GHS took effect.

Now the only MSDS (SDS) found was a Canadian one, likely for use of personnel in their Disease Control Laboratories.

What about a busload of gun-toting nuns? Is there an MSDS on that?

Now THAT would be most dangerous indeed!

Nuns with guns, better run

In the name of the Father, the Son, and into the hole he goes!!!

Maybe see what they say

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/cold/wind_chill.shtml

Actually, thank you for the informational reminder of where to look.