I've seen the wrong side of -40, when I was flying to work in Ft McMurray, Alberta for a consulting job.
One time, I drew the short straw and had to go pick up our SUVs at the parking lot upon landing. They were outside, plugged in.
The car started with the saddest sound I ever heard a mechanical thing make.
I put it in reverse, hit the gas, and pulled out of the spot. Then I put it in drive and hit the gas- and the car moved backwards. Every gear except for Park and Neutral did the same thing: reverse.
I reversed around the airport parking lot to the terminal and walked into the Hertz. When I explained the problem, they had clearly heard it before. "Don't worry about it. Just leave it on for a few minutes and you'll be fine. Transmission fluid's frozen."
In the Yukon, it's critical you let your car warm up. A block heater, battery blanket and oil pan heater are all needed, but they're only heating the actual engine block.
Think about how cold the oil in the transmission and diffs are.. let alone everything else.
You also want to drive extremely smoothly and slowly for the first ~5 mins to let everything circulate and slowly warm up to running temp - sudden moves or turns tears apart CV joints, and destroys other rubber seals.
Especially nowadays, I know that my 72 Chevy had a instructions for cold start (<32 I believe) on the back of the driver's visor which included idling for a few minutes. I've noticed people tend to turn their car on after getting situated but I still have a habit of turning it over as soon as I get in to let it warm up even though that car is, sadly, gone for now.
I said less for a reason. Most people don't have to worry about -35C. Cars start reliably down to fairly low temperatures, so they don't need to worry about it.
Sure, it may be less important, but I'd hate for someone to think that means it's majorly less important (in other terms, unimportant).. letting a car warm up in cold weather is good for it, regardless of innovations.
My fave is when the wheels freeze to the ground; so when the noob guns it - since the truck seems reasonably warm, yet stuck - the drive shaft snaps. Depending which universal joint breaks, the flailing remains can cause impressive damage.
I'm from Yellowknife, about 1000mi north of Ft McMurray. More often than not, we hit -45C with a windchill of ~ -60c.
The coldest it's ever been up here was -52c in 1947, if I'm not mistaken..
Grew up in Saskatchewan as well (Prince Albert). So, so glad I live in Vancouver now. The people were great but the weather in PA was absolutely soul crushing throughout the winter. Vancouver rarely drops into the minus and we get maybe 1-2 snowfalls a year (which usually melt as it falls). Feel like it's the tropics over here whenever I get back from visiting family/friends in PA.
I'm originally from Saskatoon, and remember a day around 2004 or 2005 where it was in the -40s, -62 with the windchill. Once was enough - I can't imagine "more often than not"!
I visited Changchun and Harbin one winter, as I was on the bus from the former to the latter, I watched the thermometer (ya, all these buses prominently displayed the outside temperature) drop from about -25 to -40...suffice it to say, my digital camera stopped working after about 5 minutes.
When I got back to beijing, it was only -10, I felt like I could wear shorts.
Even in Finland, with comparatively mild winters, cars have preheaters with timers, and most residential parking lots have an electric socket on each space for plugging cars in.
At least your power steering system was ok or you would have only been able to reverse in a straight line without the significant effort of wrenching on the wheel.
I live up in the Yukon and drove into Snag in the fall looking for Moose.
The history of the old abandoned town there is really cool, as were the Northern lights. We spent a couple of days wandering around all the old buildings, etc.
This year up on the Dempster for Caribou hunting, I saw -45C, the coldest I've seen yet. We were outside for the whole day snowshoeing around, it was spectacularly beautiful.
Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk are the only two permanently inhabited places in the world that have recorded temperatures below −60.0 °C (−76 °F) for every day in January. Oymyakon has never recorded an above freezing temperature between October 25 and March 17.
This is actually close to the temperature to sublimate CO2. I'm curious why we couldn't lower the temperature a little more and pull carbon out of the air? Has anyone investigated that?
Maybe I should buy some land there and start making dry ice and selling carbon offsets?
But you just need to lower the temperature another 20-40 degrees. It would still take some energy but since youre starting at such a low temp It would seem it would save a lot of energy.
The link is pretty convincing. What it amounts to is that there is so little CO2 in the air that sublimation into the air happens faster than any freezing out of the air.
Indeed, the article errs on that general statement. But it seems per Wikipedia that pure-mercury thermometers become unusable at -39C, when mercury solidifies. A mercury-thallium alloy can go to -61C, but apparently alcohol thermometers are preferred for measuring extreme cold, as they work to -70C. So the actual observed thermometers on that record day – those thermometers – likely did not use mercury.
Goddamn, there are places actually above the arctic circle with milder climates than this. Tromsø, Norway, has a low of -6 C (21 F) over the next week! And highs above freezing!
In 1981 when I was just out of boot camp and waiting for BE/E school at Great Lakes, IL, we had to patrol the base for I think it was 4 hours. It was -80 F wind chill factor. I thought I was going to die. I can't imagine being somewhere where the normal temperature on a given day is that cold. The wind chill must be unbearable to be outside for long.
Made me think of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky"[1], which is set on a planet where the atmosphere freezes and snows to the ground before thawing again (in 250 year cycles).
Whilst no single weather event can be linked directly to climate change, this is, surprisingly, consistent with a global increase in temperature. Whilst the rest of the Northern Hemisphere is warmer than it ever has been, Canada and the North Eastern US freezes due to an alteration to the jet stream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGsdnYqbjk
One time, I drew the short straw and had to go pick up our SUVs at the parking lot upon landing. They were outside, plugged in.
The car started with the saddest sound I ever heard a mechanical thing make.
I put it in reverse, hit the gas, and pulled out of the spot. Then I put it in drive and hit the gas- and the car moved backwards. Every gear except for Park and Neutral did the same thing: reverse.
I reversed around the airport parking lot to the terminal and walked into the Hertz. When I explained the problem, they had clearly heard it before. "Don't worry about it. Just leave it on for a few minutes and you'll be fine. Transmission fluid's frozen."