Cold (38 page)

Looking Down on the Southern Hemisphere

Geographic illustration prepared by Bill Lee

Permafrost of the Northern Hemisphere

Geographic illustration prepared by Bill Lee based on J. Brown, O. J. Ferrians Jr., J. A. Heginbottom, and E. S. Melnikov.
1997. Circum-Arctic map of permafrost and ground-ice conditions. U.S. Geological Survey Circum-Pacific Map CP-45, 1:10,000,000.
Reston, Virginia.

O
ver the past eight years, I have met and worked with hundreds of people in the Alaskan Arctic. Inupiat hunters, biologists,
archaeologists, oil field workers, activists, engineers, teachers, and others have all influenced my thinking about the Arctic
and about cold in general, as have the many gifted authors who have written about the world’s cold regions. My agent, Elizabeth
Wales, worked hard to place this book with Little, Brown and Company. My editor, John Parsley, provided important comments
and suggestions that improved the book, while also patiently walking me through the publication process. After I thought the
book was finished, copyeditor Barb Jatkola pointed out hundreds (literally) of opportunities for improvement. Glenn Wolff,
with talent and tolerance of my vagaries, drew illustrations that captured key aspects of the text. Although I have never
met Robert Twigger, his book
The Extinction Club
inspired the approach I used in
Cold
. Lisanne Aerts, Matt Cronin, Jason Hale, John Kelley, Amy King, Bill Lee, and Kathryn Temple provided comments on the draft
manuscript as well as much-needed encouragement. Bill Lee, John Kelley, and especially Lisanne Aerts also appeared, along
with many others, as unnamed companions in various passages in the book. Lastly, my dog, Lucky, deserves credit for his willingness
to lie on the office floor while I worked, even though he would rather have been out in the snow.

With a Few References, Definitions, Clarifications, and Suggested Readings

JULY

The words “Inupiat,” “Iñupiaq,” “Inupiaq,” and “Inupiak” are sometimes used interchangeably, although some residents of the
far north say that “Inupiat” refers to the people while “Iñupiaq” refers to the language, or that “Inupiat” should be used
as a noun and “Iñupiaq” as an adjective (as in “Iñupiaq people”). The Inupiat include some of the Alaskan native coastal people,
or Alaskan Eskimos, one of many Inuit, or native coastal people of the Arctic in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Iñupiaq (the
language) is notoriously difficult for outsiders, but online dictionaries are available, such as the
Iñupiaq Eskimo Dictionary
at
www.alaskool.org/language/dictionaries/inupiaq
.

World War II, like many other wars, provides interesting stories of hypothermia and frostbite. The story of the foundered
German troop carrier is related in R. Tidow’s “Aerzliche Fragen bei Seenot” (1960,
Wehrmedizinische Mitteilungen
), which was summarized in an attachment to Lorentz Wittmers and Margaret Savage’s “Cold Water Immersion,” published as chapter
17 in volume 1 of
Medical Aspects of Harsh Environments
(2002, Department of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General, Borden Institute).
Medical Aspects of Harsh Environments
also includes an atlas of cold-related injuries with gruesome but interesting full-color photographs of frostbitten hands,
feet, ears, and noses. The book can be viewed at
www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/published_ volumes/harshEnv1/harshEnv1.html
.

Orcutt Frost’s
Bering: The Russian Discovery of America
(2003, Vail-Ballou Press, New York) was the first book-length biography of Bering in a hundred years. Neither Bering’s life
itself nor written descriptions of his life have been kind, but his journeys across Siberia and then to America were remarkable
accomplishments.

Adolphus W. Greely is a well-known figure. His memoir,
Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of
1881–84
and the Attainment of the Farthest North,
was first published in 1886 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York). Reprints remain available on the used-book market.

Father Henry is described in
Kabloona: Among the Inuit
, written by the French aristocrat Gontran De Poncins and Lewis Galantiere in 1941 and recently reprinted as part of the Graywolf
Rediscovery Series (1996, Graywolf Press, St. Paul). The word “Kabloona” means “white man.” The book tells the story of Father
Henry, and also the story of one of the author’s understanding and to some degree accepting the ways of a very foreign culture.

Tom Shachtman’s
Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold
(1999, Mariner Books, New York) gives an engaging account of the history of thermometers. Daniel Fahrenheit, whose surname
has been immor talized by his temperature scale, contributed one step in the long and still ongoing journey of temperature
measurement. His scale is not especially useful outside the ranges typically encountered by humans.

Although Celsius can be converted to a rough approximation of Fahrenheit by multiplying by two and then adding thirty-two,
a more exact conversion is degrees Fahrenheit = (degrees Celsius × 9/5) + 32. Similarly, Fahrenheit can be converted to a
rough approximation of Celsius by subtracting thirty-two and then dividing by two, but a more exact conversion is degrees
Celsius = (degrees Fahrenheit − 32) × 5/9.

The precise conversion of zero Kelvin, or absolute zero, is usually given as 459.67° below zero Fahrenheit.

The complete quotation about achieving a temperature low enough to result in the formation of a super atom, from Eric Cornell,
as reported in a joint press release by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
on July 13, 1995, was “This state could never have existed naturally anywhere in the universe. So the sample in our lab is
the only chunk of this stuff in the universe, unless it is in a lab in some other solar system.” The experiment, credited
jointly to Cornell and Carl Wieman, had taken six years and involved eight graduate students and three undergraduate students.
While talking to a reporter about the Nobel Prize that came from this work, Wieman explained that he had to rush off to teach
a physics class for nonscientists. Despite his success, he retained the dedication and modesty needed to teach undergraduate
physics to a broad range of students.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, of the Scott expedition, seemed to especially enjoy talking about temperature in terms of “degrees
of frost.” He often talked of “degrees of frost” in is his 607-page memoir,
The Worst Journey in the World
(reprint, 2000, Carroll and Graf, New York), which has won high praise as an example of fine travel writing. Polar explorers
were not the only ones to measure cold temperatures in degrees of frost. In the famous short story “To Build a Fire,” Jack
London refers to a temperature of “one hundred and seven degrees of frost.”

Dante’s
Inferno
can be described as a travelogue through the circles of Hell. Canto Thirty-one takes readers into the tenth and final circle
of Hell, where traitors reside, including “betrayers of kindred” who have murdered their brothers, as well as Judas Iscariot,
Brutus, and Cassius. In Canto Thirty-four, still in the frozen tenth circle of Hell, readers meet Satan himself: “The emperor
of the reign of misery from his chest up emerges from the ice.”

Gynaephora rossii,
the woolly bear caterpillar and the moth that it becomes, is described by D. C. Ferguson in a chapter called “Noctuoidea
(in part): Lyantriidae” in the 1978 book
The Moths of America North of Mexico,
edited by R. B. Dominick et al. (E. W. Classey, London).

Neil Davis’s textbook
Permafrost: A Guide to Frozen Ground in Transition
(2001, University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks) offers a thorough technical introduction to permafrost and the formation of
various permafrost features, such as pingos, ice wedges, polygonized ground, and frost boils. Davis has been criticized for
undertaking a textbook outside his own field of geophysics, but nevertheless
Permafrost
is well worth reading.

The story of the abandonment of the
Endurance
is well known, mostly because of Ernest Shackleton’s
South: The
Endurance
Expedition,
which has been widely read since its original publication in 1919 (William Heinemann, London). The book was reprinted in
1999 by Signet (New York).

Charles Wright’s interviewer was Charles Neider, who edited the book
Antarctica: Firsthand Accounts of Exploration and Endurance
(2000, Cooper Square Press, New York). His interview of Wright appears in a chapter called “Beyond Cape Horn” in the collection
Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration,
edited by Clint Willis (1999, Thunder Mouth Press, New York).

Robert Falcon Scott’s journals were reprinted in 1996 as
Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals
(Carroll and Graf, New York).

Captain George E. Tyson’s
Tyson’s Wonderful Drift
was published in 1871 and is now difficult to find. However, it has been reprinted in part in the collection
Ring of Ice: True Tales of Adventure, Exploration, and Arctic Life
(2000, Lyons Press, New York).

Roald Amundsen is sometimes described as the most practical of the polar explorers. He considered “adventure” to be “an unwelcome
interruption” of the explorer’s “serious labours,” and he was critical of the poor planning and poor judgment that so often
led to tragedy during exploration. His book
Roald Amundsen — My Life as an Explorer
(1927, Doubleday, Garden City, NY) came out one year before he disappeared when his plane crashed during a rescue mission
in the Arctic.

Various versions of
The Story of Comock the Eskimo
remain available, including one published by Simon and Schuster (New York) in 1968. The authors are Comock, R. J. Flaherty,
and E. S. Carpenter.

Frederick Albert Cook’s
My Attainment of the Pole
(1913, Mitchell Kennedy, New York) was reprinted in 2001 by Polar Publishing (New York). Cook, considered a charlatan by
many of his contemporaries, believed that few people “have ever been made to suffer so bitterly and so inexpressively as I
because of the assertion of my achievement.”

De Long died in Siberia, but his widow, Emma J. Wotten De Long, edited and published his journal entries under the title
The Voyage of the
Jeannette:
The Ship and Ice Journals of George W. De Long, Lieutenant-Commander U.S.N., and Commander of the Polar Expedition of
1879–1881 (1884, Houghton Mifflin, New York).

The origin of the name of Narwhal Island does not seem to be well documented, but during a lunchtime conversation in 2008
in Anchorage, an Inupiat hunter told me that his grandfather had sailed on the
Narwhal.
The hunter thought the ship might have used the island as a base during the whale hunt, probably in the late 1800s.

Adolphus W. Greely’s quotations about the wretched conditions of camp life come from his memoirs, published by Charles Scribner’s
Sons (New York) in 1886 as
Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of
1881–84
and the Attainment of the Farthest North.

David L. Brainard’s account of the disastrous Greely expedition was published in 1940 as
Six Came Back: The Arctic Adventure of David L. Brainard
( Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis). Brainard, the last survivor of the Greely expedition, died in 1946.

The scientific paper that estimated the caloric needs of the Greely expedition was “Chances for Arctic Survival: Greely’s
Expedition Revisited,” written by Jan Weslawski and Joanna Legezynska and published in the journal
Arctic
(2002, vol. 4, pp. 373–79).

W. S. Schley and J. R. Soley’s
The Rescue of Greely
(1885, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York) describes the rescue of Greely but also gives a vivid description of routine life
aboard vessels sailing to the Arctic and the challenges they faced even when things went well.

Windchill is a well-known concept today, but the original report by Paul Siple and Charles Passel on their work quantifying
the effect of windchill was not available until 1945, when it was published in the
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
(vol. 89, pp. 177–99) as “Measurements of Dry Atmospheric Cooling in Sub-freezing Temperatures; Reports on Scientific Results
of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition, 1939–1941.”

For a remarkably detailed and engaging account of the Blizzard of 1888, read David Laskin’s
The Children’s Blizzard
(2004, Harper Perennial, New York).

AUGUST

Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s 1938 memoir,
Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure
(reprint, 2003, Island Press, Washington, DC), was a best seller when first published. For today’s readers, it remains the
story of a man working alone in isolation — a story of self-discipline and toughness of spirit, body, and mind.