A Sudden Chill

For those reading this from the midwest you may notice its been cooler lately, a chill that is supposed to break in the next few days. People in my neighborhood have been placing their outdoor plants, potted with arrogance a few beautiful weekends ago, indoors at night. It snowed in New York over the weekend. My father, who has long referred to Iowa as “the frozen tundra” tells me that the Lake of the Ozarks experienced overnight temperatures that threatened all-time lows last weekend. Speaking of Missouri, I have on good authority from a climate scientist friend that there’s a storm track stuck there, which puts Iowa in a colder northwest flow. "The pattern will shift after this latest Arctic air intrusion," he texted me, which sent me quickly to my laptop to furiously google "Arctic air intrusion."

Lest you think that we are headed for the next Ice Age, be advised that we are still in the current one, geographically speaking. An ice age is defined as a period in the earth's history when we have polar ice caps which, for the moment, we still do. We are technically in an interglacial period, which is a time within an ice age in which ice is receding. This period began about 10,000 years ago. That's not to say that temperatures don't fluctuate within an interglacial period. We only have good climate data dating about around 150 years but other clues, like tree rings, bubbles in sea ice and French vineyard records, which go back five centuries. It's from those records that we know quite about about the Little Ice Age, which started in the 15th century and lasted through the 18th, lowering temperatures in Europe by an average of one degree Celcius. Ice extended so far south from the north pole during this period that eskimos were recorded kayaking to Scotland. On Okney, an archipelago on the northeastern coast of that tartan-clad country, there is record of inhabitants fighting off a polar bear. 

The term "Eskimo" is one with a broad definition and covers those that live above the Arctic circle in Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Lately, using Eskimo has become unsavory by some, though it should be noted that the offended parties are rarely eskimos themselves. "Inuit" is the preferred term in Canada but Inuit has a specific definition for people who live in that country, Eskimo covers more ground and is therefore like saying "Arctic people." It is so cold where they live that they buy refrigerators to keep their food from freezing. If you took every Eskimo in the world and packed them five to a car, they all could finding parking spos at LAX, especially now. Though some Inuits lived in temporary snow igloos generations ago, they appear to be unique among Eskimos, as Alaskans and Greenlanders never lived did (and no one does anymore). In fact, a 1920s census of 14,000 Greenland eskimos found that only three hundred had ever seen a snow igloo. In that same decade, the city of Denver build a snow igloo and hired an Alaskan Eskimo to be a spokesperson for it, telling visitors that he and other reindeer herders lived in such dwellings back home. He had never seen an igloo except in the movies, presumably this one, Nanook of the North, a pioneering early documentary but also one that created more myths than informed viewers (the Eskimo in the movie wasn't even named Nanook, for example). Eskimo-Aleut, the family of languages spoken by the Inuit, Yupik, Kalaalit, Inuvialuit and others are related to each other but to no other languages on earth. These languages have no more than four words for snow, by the way. The Eskimo-Aleut family allows for endless qualifying in its language, combining root words with affixes making words that add adjectives within the word but that doesn't make them new words. It would be like saying "cold snow," "hard snow" and "yellow snow" are three different English words for snow. In Inuktitut, an eastern Canadian Eskimo-Aleut language, the word for simplicity is katujjiqatigiittiarnirlu. 

There are two Cs in the word Icelandic but no Cs in the entire Icelandic language. Icelanders call their weird little island Eesland. It got its name from a Norwegian traveller, who called it Iceland to disparage it. It is a befitting a culture in which 54% of its 2020 population believes in elves that they adopted the insult as their name. Before that, it was called Butterland, which is also what doctors call the lining of my arteries. The Icelandic phone book lists people by their first name, the world's largest display of penises and penile parts is in the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik and, lastly, "Arctic Air Intrusion" would make a killer name for an Icelandic death metal band.

The Boomerang Nebular is a dying star 5000 light years away that has been spraying out gas for 1500 years at 300,000 miles per hour. That type of emission creates seriously cold temperatures, recorded at -456°. In our solar system, the coldest temperature was recorded at 391° on the surface of Triton, one of Neptune's moons. In Antartica, temperatures have been recorded at -128°. However, if you are looking for the absolute coldest place in the entire universe, you don't need to go that far. It's in Finland, where the Helsinki University of Technology has cooled a piece of rhodium to -495°.

If you are wondering what the scientific value of making something really, really cold is, it's not just to stick it to the Boomerang Nebula, though that is a perk, it's to study superconductors, which work best at low temperatures. Superconductors increase the power of computers while heavily reducing greenhouse gases and harnessing them is one of our best chances in the fight against climate change, better than everyone staying inside for two months or so. I don't think this quarantine is going to last long enough to effect lasting environmental changes and even being secluded in our homes has an impact. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil spill killed 250,000 birds which is roughly the number that die from crashing into windows every day. Even while you sit there not driving or flying, you’re still sitting in an avian death trap. Still, you never know. Research suggests that the Black Death, which killed a quarter of humanity in the 14th century, allowed for so many more trees in places where humans used to be that the additional absorption of carbon dioxide caused the Little Ice Age. If you need more evidence that pandemics can have far reaching effects on the world, I'll leave you with this. In 1918, a German-American immigrant named Frederick died of the Spanish Flu, one of the first Americans to do so. His life insurance policy granted his son Fred the equivalent of half a million dollars, which Fred leveraged into a real estate empire. Fred's son Donald became President of the United States.