To cope with extreme cold should you be fat or fit? Lunching on lard or Weetabix? Clothed in cotton or Gore Tex? Phil will be trying to understand how humans survive temperatures as low as -90c (plus wind chill of course!). The team will be lending their bodies to the study and while surviving in Antarctica will have their faces and hands regularly plunged into iced water to see if it really does cause the heart rate to slow. The ice will not be the only thing that is blue!
Below are some pictures taken from a trial run at Portsmouth University Department of Sport and Exercise Science in May 2007. Many thanks to Mike Tipton and his team.
Perhaps the least pleasant of the tests is called the Null-Zone. The idea is we sit on an exercise bike, in a freezer, in our swim suits covered in probes. We exercise for about ten minutes until we sweat and then sit in the freezer for another hour of so, until we shiver. In the meantime lots of measurements are taken including what happens to the blood in our fingers and toes and what happens to our core body temperature. Why do you think this information might be important for when we are in Antarctica?
Another of the tests we do is to see how sensitive we are to different temperatures. We have to place our fingers on to a metal plate which gets colder and hotter. As soon as we feel a change in temperature we have to shout out.
We also have our hands and feet dunked in cold water with a probe attached that shows how the blood flow to our extremities changes when they get cold. In this way we can see if our blood vessels dilate and constrict as they are expected to when we face cold conditions.
Our fitness is a major factor and we’ll have different tests done to check out our aerobic and anaerobic fitness. The picture below shows me doing a test to find out my Vmax. This is a measure of fitness. During the test, inspired and expired gases were measured along with heart-rate. Blood samples were collected to show how much lactate we had circulating in our blood. The test lasts about 12 minutes and we have to cycle until we reach complete exhaustion.
