freezing cyclones: truth and fiction

[mellowtigger]

Remember the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" that featured massive cyclones pulling ultra-cold air down to the ground and flash freezing every living thing on the surface? The truth is similar to the story but much less worthy of dramatic notice.

In the movie, frozen mammoths from the last ice age were portrayed as victims of these flash freeze events. In truth, there really are several woolly mammoths that have been preserved for 40,000 years in very cold conditions. Some of them even had food in their mouths. It's a mistake, however, to think that they must have frozen quickly in order to keep the imagined fresh daisy flowers still in their mouths.

1) Elephants breathe primarily through their trunk. They use their mouth to breathe only when the trunk is busy doing something else. It seems reasonable to think that mammoths were similar, so we should expect that mammoths used their trunks to breathe at least part of the time.

2) The food in the mouth of these frozen animals was not springtime flowers; instead it was fall-season seed pods.

3) Considering the season (fall) and latitude (far north in modern Siberia), it's reasonable to think that a hungry mammoth accidentally fell underwater through a thinly formed ice sheet on a river, shut its mouth to avoid losing air (which happens to lock the food in place also), and used its trunk to try breathing. After succumbing to the cold, however, the poor animal's body was carried and left deposited in icy water with layers of freezing mud.

No flash freeze is necessary to explain its very unusual condition.

Hurricane Igor was recently moving across the Atlantic Ocean. It was already noted as a huge hurricane that would require 10 hours to drive by car across its entire width. Equally impressive is the temperature difference between its upper reaches and its bottom at the ocean surface: this differential spans 170F.

It should be noted here that the upper troposphere (the layer of the atmosphere that reaches the surface) reaches its lowest temperature at only -110F/-80C near the equator. While certainly cold enough to kill within minutes, it would not "flash freeze" humans into icycles during mid-stride.  Commercial airplanes frequently pass through this cold boundary on their way to higher altitudes, encountering warmer air and less turbulent air as they travel higher up in the stratosphere (the next layer of the atmosphere).

Even if Hurricane Igor brought this very cold air down to the surface (and it doesn't), a super-hurricane as depicted in the movie would still be unable to flash freeze humanity into another ice age.

Rest assured, the global warming apocalypse will not be derailed.  Cheers!

Comments

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

i remember one article about frozen mammoths in one of my Great Mysteries of the World books (the one from Reader's Digest, I'm pretty sure), that asserted that one had been found with buttercups in it's mouth, that being a shocker as such were a mid summer flower. The book had no sourcing whatsoever, but I've often wondered about the veracity of it.

I also remember a BBC report saying that scientists were claiming it could take as little as 90 years to reach full on ice age conditions. Far indeed from The Day After Tomorrow, but I'd bet that it would be very interesting times indeed, if it were true...

[mellowtigger]

Yes, I remember those stories too. Before I wrote this post, I even went googling for a drawing of a mammoth munching a flower. Like you, I have been unable to find any reliable reference to a primary source of information about the flower-chewing beast. I can find a modern study or two about pollen analysis that includes a mention of buttercups.

The closest I've got is a very old posting from 1976 that repeats the story of the mammoth with the buttercup. Again, no reference given. Very unsatisfying. I want a photograph. I want an article from the original finders of the remains.

Yes, geoengineering ideas already being brainstormed can place atmospheric cooling within the realm of the possible. I don't doubt the time scale or the efficacy of the plans. I am very leery of our ability to suss out the consequences of any additional actions we take to alter our atmosphere. I mean... terraforming our only terra? What could go wrong? :/