The cold, the cold, the dastardly cold
It wants to freeze everything it touches. And it wants to touch everything.
It always puzzles me how ill-prepared Canada is to deal with the cold and snow, which is something we get every winter, particularly in the North. We really could use a couple snow and ice research centres. There is still so much to learn because the powers that be i.e. the various levels of government just seem to ignore it.
When you work or live in the wilds, there are a few tricks you quickly learn. One was when you set up a tent in winter, cut spruce boughs to insulate the floor and then bank the tent with as much snow as possible. This creates snow walls around your tent. Snow is a great insulation, and the banks or walls cut down on wind chill and heat loss considerably. When I lived in a trailer in Northlands, I would bank the trailer almost up to the windows with snow and it really does make the place much warmer and keep the pipes underneath the trailer from freezing. True, some people thought I was a little crazy but others took note and banked their own trailers.
In winter, we didnSA国际影视传媒檛 take fridges or freezers out to the bush or put them in heated tents or buildings along with a generator to run them. We simply put the frozen food outside in either boxes or coolers. In summer, we dug a hole in the ground until we hit the ice and frozen ground and created a freezer and cooler that way.
So why havenSA国际影视传媒檛 we developed a way to take the cold air outside to keep our fridges and freezer inside working? In winter, we are surrounded by cold and in summer, we have the permafrost layer. We could make some cold traps, to store the cold until summer just like permafrost does. This would save all the electricity we use to keep things inside cool. When you stop to think about it, we are wasting a whole lot of electricity with fridges and freezers when we have free cold all around us.
One year, close to Christmas, a friend who was hosting a get-together called me and asked if I could pick up four bags of ice at the store for him. I said sure. So I stopped by the grocery store and picked the ice up. The bags said the Ice had been made in Edmonton and trucked the 1,503 km to Yellowknife. Does that make any sense? Surely at -40 C we can make our own ice. Maybe they should pass a rule that it is illegal to import ice into the NWT because we have a whole lot of our own and we can always make more. As a kid, I can remember companies harvesting ice from the lakes and storing it in sheds with sawdust to be used during the summer. It was an actual industry and people used iceboxes long before refrigerators were invented.
Maybe it is time to rethink things and use the resources we have. We certainly have a lot of cold, ice and snow to work with. Also, we have several mining shafts, portals and caverns underground that we could use for all sorts of things from freezers in the permafrost layer to geothermal heat deeper underground. We could have underground storage areas; storage or the old mine workings could be used as emergency shelters or for the military to help strengthen our defences.
Now, here is something significant: when saltwater freezes, it extrudes the salt so sea ice, if melted, is fresh drinkable water. This makes one wonder what happens when you freeze other solutions. Also, from experience, the colder it gets, strange things start to happen and around -40 C, some metals become brittle and are prone to break. We really should create metal parts that work at extremely cold temperatures. If we studied cold as much as we study heat, we might discover better ways to deal with and use it. With a little fancy chemistry, it might even be possible to use the cold to produce heat.
Let's look at the resources we have and at the reality of living in a cold winter climate and make some adjustments to the way we do things. Who knows? The dastardly cold might even become our friend.
