You replace your gloves, noticing only that your fingers have numbed slightly.

Your body is allowing your fingers to chill in order to keep its vital organs warm.

Instinctively, the web of surface capillaries on your hands constrict, sending blood coursing away from your skin and deeper into your torso. Within a few seconds, the palms of your hands are a chilly, painful 60 degrees. The process begins even before you leave the car, when you remove your gloves to squeeze a loose bail back into one of your ski bindings. 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. One of Europe’s worst weather disasters occurred during a 1964 competitive walk on a windy, rainy English moor three of the racers died from hypothermia, though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45.īut 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. Others are less fortunate, even in much milder conditions.

She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 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. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold.

Word for freezing to death