Cold (40 page)

The Pennsylvania State University student posted a description of his experience at the Barrens at
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~benedict/weather/barrens.shtml
.

Within Pennsylvania, there are other barrens: the Moosic Mountain Barrens and the Serpentine Barrens are two examples. John
McPhee’s 1967 article “The Pine Barrens,” published in the
New Yorker
and later republished as a short book (1968, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York), describes life in one of America’s more
accessible barrens, in New Jersey. Many of the barrens scattered across the United States have been overcome by suburban sprawl,
an unfortunate situation, since barrens often support unique plant and animal communities.

Scott Weidensaul’s contribution to the avian literature
Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
(1999, North Point Press, New York) provides useful information on bird migration. The quotations from Magnus, Aristotle,
and Homer are cited in Jean Dorst’s
The Migrations of Birds
(1962, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) and Weiden-saul’s
Living on the Wind.

Bird collisions are an important conservation issue. Collisions with windows may kill more than one hundred million birds
each year. An additional fifty million to one hundred million are killed in collisions with cars and trucks. Bird collisions
with aircraft also pose a serious problem for both birds and aircraft. For example, a 1995 crash of an AWACs battlefield radar
plane was attributed to collisions with geese, and a 1998 commercial jet flight made an emergency landing after experiencing
an engine malfunction caused by a bird strike. In 2009, as
Cold
was going to press, another commercial flight was forced to make an emergency landing—this time in the Hudson River—when
a bird strike caused engine failure. USA Bird Strike Committee maintains records, including photographs, of aircraft-bird
collisions.

The estimate of one hundred million birds per year killed by cats in the United States is provided by the National Audubon
Society. Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College has estimated that cats kill seven million birds each year in Wisconsin alone.

NOVEMBER

The 2004 article on damselfish enzymes, by Glenn C. Johns and George N. Somero, is called “Evolutionary Convergence in Adaptation
of Proteins to Temperature: A
₄
-Lactate Dehydrogenases of Pacific Damsel-fishes (
Chromis
spp.)”
(Molecular Biology and Evolution,
vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 314–20). Although the article is highly specialized, it is to some degree accessible to anyone with basic
biological training.

The discussion about the cod fishery and other events of the Little Ice Age draws on Brian Fagan’s
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Change Made History,
1300–1850 (2000, Basic Books, New York).

Gabrielle Walker, in her book
Snowball Earth: The History of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know
It
(2003, Three Rivers Press, New York), describes Douglas Mawson’s book as “one of the best books ever written about Antarctic
exploration, and yet little known outside Australia.” Douglas Mawson,
The Home of the Blizzard
(1998, St. Martin’s Press, New York).

Robert Rosenberg’s 2005 article “Why Is Ice Slippery?” (December 2005,
Physics Today,
pp. 50–55) inspired a response by Vitaly Kresin describing work done in 1891 by the renowned experimental physicist Robert
Wood. Wood put a block of ice in a powerful hydraulic press to demonstrate that pressure would not melt the water, arguing
against what was then called the pressure-molten theory. Nevertheless, the belief that pressure from skis and ice skates melts
the underlying ice remains alive today, even in textbooks.

In addition to being recognized as the world’s northernmost tree, the dahurian larch is also long-lived. One dahurian larch
in Yakutia, in Siberia, is believed to be more than nine hundred years old.

The diminutive willows, as they are sometimes known collectively, may be quite old despite their size. Individuals of 180
and 236 years old have been reported from Greenland.

Peter Marchand’s
Life in the Cold
(1996, University Press of New England, Hanover, NH) provides very useful descriptions of plant adaptations to cold, including
tables of temperature tolerances. In addition, March-and provides information on human tolerance of cold in a chapter called
“Humans in Cold Places.” Similarly, James Halfpenny and Roy Ozanne’s
Winter: An Ecological Handbook
(1989, Johnson Books, Boulder, CO) provides useful information in a chapter titled “People and Winter.”

What may have been Alaska’s northernmost accessible tree of any size grew next to the Dalton Highway, which runs parallel
to the Trans Alaska Pipeline and connects Fairbanks to the North Slope oil fields. A prominent sign with large blue letters
was erected in front of the tree saying
FARTHEST NORTH SPRUCE TREE ON THE ALASKAN PIPELINE. DO NOT CUT
. Perhaps inevitably, someone girdled the tree, apparently with the sort of small hatchet often carried by campers, ultimately
killing it. There are, however, a number of smaller black spruce trees farther north just off the highway. They are not protected
by signs and may eventually outgrow their protected but now dead neighbor.

Bernie Karl, the current owner of Chena Hot Springs Resort, is an out-spoken entrepreneur. In addition to running his Aurora
Ice Museum, he experiments with geothermal power, including generation of power using relatively low-temperature (less than
two hundred degrees) hot spring water. He also heats his greenhouse with water from a hot spring.

Charles Darwin’s description of events in Tierra del Fuego comes from
The Voyage of the
Beagle, first published by Henry Colburn in 1839 but reprinted many times and readily available as a Penguin Classic (1989,
London). Readers of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
will find a different Darwin in
The Voyage of the
Beagle. Darwin the scientist and thinker is still very much present, but he is accompanied by Darwin the seasick adventurer,
a much more interesting and charming narrator.

The quotation about frostbite is from an e-medicine online clinical reference called “Frostbite,” written by C. Crawford Mechem
of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (
www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic209.htm
). However, bearing in mind the history of race relations, one cannot dismiss the possibility that some of the differences
seen in some studies and statistics reflect biases in the treatment of the research subjects. For example, it may not be possible
to know whether black soldiers in Korea were given similar training, issued similar gear and food, and sent on similar missions
as white soldiers. The most grievous example of racism in the annals of cold research comes from Nazi experiments at Dachau.
This “research” is ignored here for ethical reasons.

Most of the information on the University of Alaska experiment comes from Ned Rozell’s article “The Skinny on Humans and Cold”
(February 6, 1997,
The Alaska Science Forum,
no. 1323). Rozell works for the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, translating arcane research into interesting
articles that appear in numerous publications. Laurence Irving’s book
Arctic Life of Birds and Mammals, Including Man
(1972, Springer-Verlag, New York), which includes a description of his experiment, is out of print but can be found in some
collections.

Charles Wright’s interviewer was Charles Neider, who edited the book
Antarctica: Firsthand Accounts of Exploration and Endurance
(2000, Cooper Square Press, New York).

DECEMBER

True Chinook winds are a type of foehn wind — a wind whose temperature increases as it moves down the downwind side of a mountain
range. The temperature increase is caused by an increase in pressure with loss of altitude. Santa Ana winds are another type
of foehn wind.

Kenneth Risenhoover collected data from January through April at Denali National Park as part of a study published in 1986,
“Winter Activity Patterns of Moose in Interior Alaska” (
Journal of Wildlife Management,
vol. 50, pp. 727–34). In winter, the park is beautiful but brutally cold. One cannot help but wonder whether Risenhoover
compared his experiences to those of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his companions during their quest for penguin eggs.

The description of the use of a hot potato to assess the insulative qualities of a flying squirrel’s nest comes from Bernd
Heinrich’s
Winter World
(2003, HarperCollins, New York). Part of the joy of reading Heinrich’s books comes from his innovative approach to ecological
research. Whereas some scientists would contrive complex field or laboratory measurements or experiments to measure the insulative
qualities of nests, Heinrich used a hot potato, a watch, and a thermometer. Another wonderful aspect of Heinrich’s work is
his use of quotations from difficult-to-find publications. For example, both quotations about crossbill nest insulation later
in this chapter are from
Winter World
. The 1900 quotation is attributed to J. Grinnell’s “Birds of the Kotzebue Sound Region” (
Pacific Coast Avifauna,
no. 1), and the 1909 quotation is attributed to J. Macoun’s
Catalogue of Canadian Birds
.

Many researchers have reported on the diversity of invertebrates found in snow, or the subnivean invertebrates. C. W. Aitchison,
for example, has published a number of papers on invertebrate diversity in snow, including a series of papers in 1978 and
1979 in the
Symposia of the Zoological Society of London,
the
Manitoba Entomologist,
and
Pedobiologia.
A partial compilation of Aitchison’s findings provided the list of invertebrates found in snow in Canada.

William Pruitt’s book
Wild Harmony: The Cycle of Life in the Northern Forest
(1988, Douglas and McIntyre, Vancouver) translates the science of the Taiga into elegant and readable prose. Pruitt is also
known for work in Alaska that contributed to the end of the U.S. government’s Project Chariot, which called for the use of
hydrogen bombs to dig a harbor near Point Hope. Pruitt and his colleagues working on Project Chariot undertook what is sometimes
described as the first environmental assessment ever to stop a major project. Dan O’Neill’s Alaskan classic
The Firecracker Boys
(1994, St. Martin’s Press, New York) describes Pruitt’s role and its consequences.

Bethany Leigh Grenald’s article “Women Divers of Japan” (Summer 1998,
Michigan Today
) gives one of the few contemporary accounts of ama divers in English. In an age of feminism and environmentally sustainable
practices, it is difficult to understand why ama divers do not attract more attention.

The Bowhead Whale,
a special publication of the Society for Marine Mammology, edited by John Burns, Jerome Montague, and Cleveland Cowles (1993,
Allen Press, Lawrence, KS), is an excellent resource on bowhead whales.
Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals,
edited by William Perrin, Bernd Wursig, and J. G. M. Thewissen (2002, Academic Press, New York), is an extensive general
resource on whales, including cold-water adaptations and feeding habits. The scientific literature on whales is remarkably
vast and complex, even though these animals spend most of their time underwater in remote parts of the world’s oceans.

The writing of J. Michael Yates is so lyrical that it blurs the distinction between prose and poetry. The passages here come
from Yates’s story “The Hunter Who Loses His Human Scent,” first published in
Man in the Glass Octopus
(1970, Sono Nis Press, Vancouver). During a varied career, Yates worked as a prison guard in Canada, an experience he captured
in his book
Line Screw
(1993, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto).

Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s
The Worst Journey in the World
(2000, Carroll and Graf, New York) tells the story of the recovery of the penguin eggs. Despite the book’s very appropriate
title, Cherry-Garrard seems to have relished the journey, at least after the fact. One can imagine him enjoying the cold even
as it beat him into submission. His two companions, Edward “Bill” Wilson and Birdie Bowers, survived the penguin egg journey
only to die with Scott on the South Pole expedition.

Chicken, Alaska, with a current population of about twenty residents, originated as a gold mining settlement around 1880.
The town’s early inhabitants wanted to name their community Ptarmigan, because these chicken-like white birds were abundant
in the surrounding country, but they could not agree on the admittedly odd spelling of this species. With the pragmatism of
miners everywhere, they named the town Chicken instead.

David Sibley’s
The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior
(2001, Alfred A. Knopf, New York) summarizes the scientific literature on feathers, including the evolution of feathers.

JANUARY

The hydrologists were working on the North Slope Lakes Project, described at
http://www.uaf.edu/water/projects/nsl/reports/L9312_Hydro _Note_091906.pdf
.

Arctic foxes are remarkably adept at finding food in and around human camps and facilities. Begging, foraging in supposedly
animal-proof Dumpsters, and even brazenly walking through open kitchen doors are all common practices. Once animals are habituated
to humans, the potential for aggressive behavior increases. Rabies, of course, makes aggressive behavior even more likely.

When a volume of air shrinks because it is compressed, the energy carried in the original volume of air is concentrated in
the smaller volume, so the temperature increases. This is called adiabatic or isocaloric heating. The opposite effect is seen
when pressure is reduced. Diesel engines, for example, use adiabatic heating instead of spark plugs to ignite fuel. A piston
compresses air and diesel fuel until the temperature reaches the point of ignition.