Cold Cut

backyard · february 02010

A few weeks ago I came across an article by Peter Stark detailing what happens to the human body when it’s exposed to progressively colder temperatures and, conversely, what happens when it is—and can be—revived. It’s a fascinating read, especially if, like me, you have a slightly morbid fascination for death by exposure to cold.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau's cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it's lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived.

…

But for all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike--and whether it will kill when it does. The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

Peter Stark, “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow…”
Outside, January 01997