Friday Factoids #3 – Winter’s a’comin’

November 18, 2005 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

Winter’s almost here (yay!) so I thought I’d dig up some winter-related factoids:

10 inches of snow melts down to the equivalent of about an inch of rainfall.
Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia, have been chosen by the International Olympic Committee to host the Winter Olympic Games in 2010.
Wind chill is the combination of temperature and wind speed. The original wind chill formula was derived from experiments conducted in 1939 by Antarctic explorers, Paul Siple and Charles Passel, but you can calculate it yourself using Environment Canada’s wind chill calculator page.
Hypothermia, sometimes called exposure, occurs when the body can no longer produce more heat than it is losing. The body’s internal temperature then drops below 35°C or 95°F.
The world’s first park north of the Arctic Circle is Auyuittuq, Nunavut.
The snowiest national capitol in the world is Ottawa; the world’s coldest national capital is Ulaanbataar, Mongolia.
Vostok, Antarctica, holds the world’s record for coldest temperature: -89.4°C/-129°F (21-July-1983). However, at a physics lab in the University of Sussex, a gas has been cooled to within a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero, and liquid helium has been cooled to 90 microK (a ‘microkelvin’ is a millionth of a K) at the University of Lancaster.
Absolute zero is the point at which all motion of particles would theoretically cease; 0K/0°R/ ?273.15°C/?459.67°F.
The coldest place in the Solar System is probably Triton, a moon of the distant planet Neptune, some 2,800 million miles away, although space itself is colder yet.