I think they call that hazing.
What is the coldest you have ever been ?
- Thread starter kevin37b
- Start date
ning
Elite Member
I've had that sensation jumping into an ice-cold lake as well (like, there's a snowfield into the lake with some visible underwater).
Not hypothermia, yet. Give it a minute though and it would be, but I pretty much bounced off of the surface of that lake I got out so fast.
Here's a great video, off topic as it is:
ning
Elite Member
Definitely not an OSHA approved practice and hopefully will get someone in official trouble before a sudden storm blows in and kills a hazee.
-85F would immediately freeze flesh on contact... with more than the extremely dry air there. I wouldn't be surprised if they lost the outer layer of skin in the process but believe it or not dry air doesn't carry much heat away. Touch -85F metal and you're losing a chunk of whatever touched that metal, but that's because the density of metal (high) and the heat conductivity (good).
In fact it's possible to build a non-insulative mechanical pressure suit for astronauts to survive in a hard vacuum instead of wearing their portable atmospheric pressure suit - the skin can actually be exposed to a vacuum as long as there's some mechanical support, and so wearing a supportive mesh is actually sufficient to operate in a vacuum (except for the eyes, nose/mouth/respiration, and ears - you still need an environmental helmet - and I'd recommend a codpiece as well) - even though space is effectively very close to absolute zero. How does a mesh protect you against nearly absolute zero temperatures? It's simple - there's nothing in a vacuum to carry your heat away, so the only heat you lose is actually via (black body) radiation. Compared to the incomparably hotter (-85F vs -450F) metal, a vacuum is much less dense (1 atom/cm3 vs 7.85 g/cm3 for steel) and absolutely terrible at heat conductivity. You're actually at greater danger of overheating in space than freezing, especially if you're exposed to the sun (incident radiation is far higher than your emission).
This is related to -85F in Antarctica because the air is so dry there that there's very little matter contacting the body and allowing convective heat transfer - the absolute humidity is often 1/5 to 1/10 that of more temperate places. Water in the air affects your temperature more than oxygen and nitrogen because if a little bit of water - even a microdroplet - touches your skin, it will absorb a ton of heat from your body in the process of evaporation (it takes 1 calorie to raise 1 cc of liquid water 1 degree C, but it takes almost 600 calories just to change 1 cc of liquid water at 0C to water vapor at 0C). If there's no water at all in the air, it will barely cool you unless it's really dense; dry normal pressure air doesn't affect body temperature very much.
