Cold (2 page)

There is more than one way to measure temperature. Daniel Fahrenheit, a German working in Amsterdam as a glassblower in the
early 1700s, developed the mercury thermometer and the temperature scale still familiar to Americans. He built on work dating
back to just after the time of Christ and modified by the likes of Galileo, who used wine instead of mercury, and Robert Hooke,
appointed curator of the Royal Society in 1661, who developed a standard scale that was used for almost a century. In 1724,
Fahrenheit described the calibration of his thermometer, with zero set at the coldest temperature he could achieve in his
shop with a mixture of ice, salt, and water, and 96 set by sticking the instrument in his mouth to, in his words, “acquire
the heat of a healthy man.” He found that water boiled at 212 degrees. With only a minor adjustment to his scale, he declared
that water froze at 32 degrees, leaving 180 degrees in between, a half circle, reasonable at a time when nature was believed
by some to possess aesthetic symmetry.

Anders Celsius, working in Sweden, came up with the Celsius scale in 1742. Conveniently, it put freezing water at zero and
boiling water at one hundred degrees. Less conveniently, it set in place a competition between two scales. An Australian talking
to an American has to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit, or the American will think of Australia as too cold for kangaroos.
An American talking to an Australian has to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, or the Australian will think of America as
too hot for anything but drinking beer. The Australian is forced to multiply by two and add thirty-two, or the American is
forced to subtract thirty-two and divide by two. Or, as more often happens, they drop the matter of temperature altogether.

Lord Kelvin realized in 1848 that both Fahrenheit and Celsius had set their zero points way too high. He understood that heat
could be entirely absent. At least conceptually, absolute zero was a possibility. He came up with his own scale, based on
degrees Celsius, but with zero set at the lowest possible temperature, the point at which there is no heat. Zero Kelvin is
459 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Just above this temperature, helium becomes a liquid. Anywhere close to absolute zero,
and all things familiar to the normal world disappear. Molecular motion slows and then stops. A new state of matter, called
a “super atom” — something that is neither gas nor liquid nor solid — comes into being. But Kelvin’s understanding of the
strange world that exists within a few degrees of absolute zero was theoretical. By the time he died, in 1907, his colleagues
were struggling to force temperatures colder than 418 degrees below zero, 41 degrees above absolute zero, and helium had not
yet been liquefied.

One of the physicists who first achieved a temperature low enough for the formation of a super atom, which did not occur until
1995, had this to say: “This state could never have existed naturally anywhere in the universe, unless it is in a lab in some
other solar system.”

Our planet’s polar explorers used, for the most part, Fahrenheit’s scale, but rather than talking of degrees below zero, they
often talked of “degrees of frost.” One degree of frost was one degree below freezing Fahrenheit. An explorer might write
in his journal of fifty degrees of frost — eighteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit — and in the next paragraph tell of the
amputation of a frozen toe, or describe himself gnawing on a boot to stave off the starvation that so often accompanies cold,
or mention in passing how he had to beat fifteen pounds of ice from the bottom of his sleeping bag before bedding down for
the night. Or, after an especially cold and uncomfortable spell, he might write of the relative warmth and relief of fifty-five
degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who supported Robert Falcon Scott on his disastrous 1910 Antarctic expedition,
did just that. “Now,” he wrote, “if we tell people that to get only 87 degrees of frost can be an enormous relief they simply
won’t believe us.” But an enormous relief it would be for one accustomed to camping at 75 degrees below zero, or 107 degrees
of frost.

In his memoirs, Cherry-Garrard concurred with Dante, who placed the circles of ice beneath the circles of fire in his vision
of Hell.

It is July eighteenth and nearly fifty degrees under an overcast sky. I walk slowly across Arctic tundra next to an abandoned
airstrip, stalking
Gynaephora rossii
. The trouble with this beast — the woolly bear caterpillar of the far north — is that it is not easy to find here near Prudhoe
Bay. Woolly bear caterpillars are substantially smaller than woolly mammoths. Woolly mammoths, but for their unfortunate extinction,
would be easy to spot. But these woolly bear caterpillars are smaller than a mammoth’s eyebrow. And this terrain is not conducive
to stalking insect larvae. Though flat and treeless, the terrain is uneven. The prudent searcher watches his footing when
he should be watching for caterpillars. Every few steps, water-filled cracks in the ground require minor detours. The cracks
form when the ground contracts and expands in response to temperature changes. Once a crack forms, it fills with water. When
the water freezes, the ice expands and widens the crack. A wedge of ice forms and grows, and the crack eventually becomes
too wide to step across. Cracks intercept other cracks. Together, they make a network outlining polygons that are thirty feet
wide. They polygonize the landscape.

The cracks are beginning to find their way across the abandoned airstrip. Next to the cracks, where water pools through the
summer months, grass grows lusciously green. Between the cracks, in the centers of the polygons, the greenery struggles —
less dense, less luscious. Or even not luscious at all. Despite all this water, the ground can be dry between the cracks,
and dust covers some of the plants. Just days ago, the creamy flowers of arctic dryas made patches of this dry ground look
like miniature gardens of snowy roses. Now their dried scraggly puffball seed heads are all that remains. In the Arctic, blink,
and summer is gone.

Underneath, eighteen inches down, the ground is frozen. It remains frozen for a third of a mile before heat from the earth’s
innards overcomes the cold from above. Poking the ground with a steel rod, one can feel the permafrost — the permanently frozen
ground. It’s like hitting bedrock just eighteen inches down.

Where are the caterpillars? I find a biologist who has been working here since May, counting birds. I ask her if she has seen
any caterpillars. “I’ve only seen one,” she tells me.

Later, I talk to an Inupiat elder. “I see them sometimes,” he says. “Maybe once each year.” Inupiat frequently pause when
they talk, leaving what might seem like an uncomfortable silence. I have been told that the pauses give them time to think
and therefore to avoid the mindless patter of whites. “They like high ground,” he says after a moment. “I see them near my
camp at Teshekpuk Lake.”

The little beasts eat willow buds. I squat on the tundra to check some of the willows growing on the high ground between water-filled
cracks. These willows are related to the taller willows of warmer climates, but they never stand more than a few inches tall.
Their trunks can be measured in fractions of an inch. I find neither caterpillars nor gnawed buds. I pluck a leaf and pop
it into my mouth. It tastes like an aspirin salad. I move on.

Hyperactive birds fly around the airstrip. A plover screeches at me and makes threatening dives, driving me away from its
young. In tundra ponds and in water-filled cracks, phalaropes swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to
their feet. A pair of snow buntings perch for a second on top of a pipeline next to the airstrip and then fly off. A long-billed
dowitcher, its beak disproportionately long, flushes from the ground in front of me. Behind it, a hundred yards away, five
caribou graze, their antlers imitating the beak of the dowager in their freakish length.

Soon all of this activity will cease. The birds will fly away. The caribou will march south. The caterpillars will simply
freeze. That is why I am interested. That is why I want one of these caterpillars. The little devils have figured out how
to freeze solid without dying. They are slow growers. It might take a decade before they are ready to metamorphose into grayish
moths. That means they survive through ten winters here in the Arctic. When spring comes, they thaw and go back to eating.
For a pet lover who travels, they could be the perfect solution. Cute, furry, and quiet, and the freezer serves as a kennel.
But where are they? If I were looking for oil, I would have just successfully drilled a dry hole, a duster. I have been skunked
by a caterpillar.

The polar explorers were great keepers of journals, and many of the survivors produced memoirs. Cold for the polar explorers
came with a sense of pride, but also uncertainty, hunger, exhaustion, and death. The body’s boilers run on food, and as often
as not, death from prolonged exposure to cold combines starvation, frostbite, and hypothermia. When one reads past the stoicism
and heroics, the history of polar exploration becomes one long accident report mixed with one long obituary.

There was, of course, discomfort. In 1909, Ernest Shackleton traveled to within ninety-seven miles of the South Pole. Realizing
that his provisions would be stretched if he pushed farther, he turned around. He told his wife, “I thought you would rather
have a live donkey than a dead lion.” In 1914, during a later exploration, his ship
Endurance
was iced in and eventually abandoned. He led his men slowly across the ice. In his travelogue, he wrote, “I have stopped
issuing sugar now, and our meals consist of seal-meat and blubber only, with 7 ozs. of dried milk per day for the party.”
This is at a time of inactivity, camped on ice. “The diet suits us, since we cannot get much exercise on the floe and the
blubber supplies heat,” he wrote. Eventually, the ice gave way, cracking under his camp. “The crack had cut through the site
of my tent,” he wrote. “I stood on the edge of the new fracture, and, looking across the widening channel of water, could
see the spot where for many months my head and shoulders had rested when I was in my sleeping bag.”

Charles Wright survived Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 Antarctic expedition and knew just how important those sleeping bags were.
He — with Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who had grasped Dante’s reasons for placing the circles of ice beneath those of fire in the
depths of Hell — was one of the men who supported Scott, hauling Scott’s gear south for the first leg into the heart of Antarctica.
The support team turned back and waited at their base camp, but Scott and the four men who continued to the pole would not
survive. Long afterward, at eighty-six years old, Wright talked to an interviewer about man-hauling sleds in Antarctica. The
interviewer asked about toilet habits on the trail, the point being that getting up in the middle of the night to relieve
oneself involved more than just stepping outside of the tent in your boxers. “You see,” Wright explained,

you’ve come from your sleeping bag, you’ve taken into the sleeping bag all the frozen sweat of the previous day, and the previous
day and the previous day and the previous day. There’s a log of it at the end. And during the night you first melt that frozen
sweat. And very often it freezes at the bottom of the bag, where your feet are. And if you’re going to have a decent night
you’ve got to melt all that before you have a chance. And even then it’s not comfortable because whatever is next door is
wet and cold, and every breath you take brings some of the cold stuff into the small of your back. So a winter’s night when
you’re sledging is not a comfortable thing at all. But you’ve got to, before you get anywhere, you’ve got to melt the ice.
And sometimes there’s fifteen pounds of ice or something like that that’s got to be turned into water before you begin to
sleep.

From Wright’s account it is clear that Antarctic explorers disciplined their bladders and stayed in those half-frozen bags
as long as possible.

Scott himself kept a journal right up until his death. Eight months later, a search party found his camp. In the camp, Scott’s
frozen body lay between two of his frozen companions. The three men in the tent, it has been said, looked as if they were
sleeping. The three bodies, along with Scott’s journal, were recovered.