How Cold is C-o-l-d!
As an extreme mountaineer cum skier cum adventurer with almost my entire lifetime spent in cold places, the two questions that I most often face are: 1. Why do you climb? 2. How cold is it up there (Everest, South or North Pole, Greenland, Alaska, etc) I am still rather fuzzy about the first question since I do not understand this perennial urge deep within to go climbing with or without reason so I would like to answer the second one. What is cold all about! I won't go into the science of 'COLD' or 'ICE' but just my own understanding. The feeling of cold simply put is the act of your body losing heat to the surrounding atmosphere. The effect of losing body heat is also linked with the wind speed at the moment. So to understand cold, we also have to understand, 'Wind Chill Factor'. For the same absolute temperature, the rate of losing heat (in effect the feeling of being cold) would increase with the increase in wind speed. For practical purposes, when we cl...