Early one New Year's Eve morning in Minnesota, back in 1980, a man named Wally Nelson stumbled across the body of his friend, lying in the snow just a few meters from his door.
, a chilled body can put the brakes on the whole dying process long enough to deal with a low pulse, at least for a while.Forget the fact her body temperature was barely 27 degrees Celsius, a full 10 degrees below that of a healthy human. She was – apparently – frozen. Her face was ashen, eyes solid, and her skin, the physician who treated her,"The body was cold, completely solid, just like a piece of meat out of a deep freeze.
Yet within just a few hours, warmed by heating pads, Hilliard's body returned to a state of health. She was talking by noon, and with little more than some numb, blistered toes, was soon discharged to live an unremarkable life unaffected by her night as a human popsicle.to the power of prayer. But where does biology stand on the matter?Unlike many materials, water takes up a greater volume as a solid than it does as a liquid.
Even a few stray ice crystals blooming in the wrong place can pierce cell membranes with their needle-like shards, reducing extremities to blackened patches of dead skin and muscle, or what we commonly know as frostbite. Various animals have evolved some nifty adaptations to deal with the dangers of sharp, expanding ice crystals in sub-freezing conditions. Deep-sea fish known as Antarctic blackfin icefishinto a syrup by flooding its body with glucose, thus resisting freezing and dehydration. Outside of their cells, water is free to turn into a solid, encasing tissues in ice and making them look, for all purposes, as solid as frog-shaped ice cubes.
Without anything more to go on than external observations, it's hard to say for sure how Hilliard's body withstood being frozen. Was there something unique about her body chemistry? Or even the make-up of her tissues?Maybe. A far more important question is what exactly 'frozen' means in this case. Although low, Hilliard's core body temperature was reportedly still far above freezing.
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