By Chuck Hinson
Special to the Turnagain Times
Bill Streever has done an amazing job compiling a book of fun facts around the concept of cold in his book Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places.
The subject is a natural for Streever, a biologist living in Anchorage who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Advisory Technical Panel. If you think that's a lot of information, wait until you read this book.
It took a little time for me to adjust to Streever's writing style in. First, I think it was because he organized the book in 12 chapters by the months of the year, starting with July. I thought, what kind of information concerns cold in the summer months? Believe it or not, he tackles that head on.
On a foggy day at the North Slope, he says, “I suffer in the midsummer cold…It is July 31. Here, a mile from the Beaufort Sea, the thermometer struggles to break forty degrees.” He converts the temperature downward by giving an account of Paul Siple who is credited with the conceptualization of wind chill factors (the Siple-Passel equation) in 1940. He tells the reader that the temperature feels worse as it gets colder, especially with foggy conditions, because moist air sucks heat away faster than dry air. He also fills the reader in on the discoveries of Daniel Fahrenheit in Amsterdam and Anders Celsius in Sweden, as well as how to convert their two scales.
His mini-lessons include all kinds of stuff as he recounts his year studying the cold. We learn about the Pleistocene Ice Age, hibernation, cryogenics, a walk through an ice tunnel describing the effects of permafrost, Europe's infamous Year Without Summer, a poem by Emily Dickinson that brings hypothermia to mind, various pole expeditions, bird migrations, and in 1888, the School Children's Blizzard in middle America, where temperatures dropped so fast and drastically that the cattle froze in place standing and over 250 human lives were taken by such things as hypothermia and frostbite.
He includes a section on what might keep someone warm: rabbit fur in Poland, wools from Finn sheep and the Scottish Blackface sheep, cashmere from the Indian goat, musk ox wool (where a full grown animal sheds five pounds of quviut each year), nylon (invented by a researcher at Dupont who once taught organic chemistry and specialized in the study of long chains of repeating units of atoms called polymers), Polarguard, Hollofil, Gore-Tex and Micro-Loft.
It's actually astonishing how many cold facts exist. Once I got used to Streever's pacing, I learned a lot. He makes things personal too as he describes a dip in the Beaufort Sea, the physics of skiing (why skis drag when temperatures drop) as he takes jaunts with his son in Anchorage, visiting London, climbing a Scottish mountain, and freezing a couple of unsuspecting caterpillars (one named Bedford for the retired psychology professor who ordered his body to be immediately immersed in liquid nitrogen after his death from cancer. It's still waiting for a cure.)
Streever touches on global warming, referring to “catastrophic tipping points,” where there could be a “conveyer belt breakdown,” as ocean water warms northern climates. David Laskin of The Washington Post, who authored The Children's Blizzard, was disappointed that Streever didn't “connect the many scattered dots” as he wrote about the effects of climate change.
Dwight Garner of the New York Times reviewed Cold, and described the book as a “…more free-form one that moves easily from geography and biology to history, myth and folklore….(His) writing style feels original and organic: it is flinty and tough-minded, with just enough humor glowing around the edges to keep you toasty and dry.”
I liked it more than I expected to. The man loves his subject. At one point, he responds to a fellow biologist, “What would be the fun in a book on warmth?”
On a snowmachine in Barrow in his January chapter, he writes, “We look out over the frozen ocean and see nothing but wind-sculptured waves of snow and ice. Though invisible, there are also seals and bears and arctic foxes, and farther out, the North Pole. Soft light comes in low and angles across the ice. We stare at the northern ice cap…there is nothing more to see than a rough white surface disappearing into the horizon, yet we stand silently for some time, concerned that in turning away we might miss something very important, something crucial to our well-being and somehow central to our lives.”
Brrrr.
Chuck Hinson owns Girdwood Books and News in downtown Girdwood.
