The Canadian Cryosphere Early in October of 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced government plans for new arctic studies of Canada’s Far North. These were projects designed to defend and to re-assert Canadian arctic sovereignty in the face of threats from Russia and bullying innuendoes from The United States about an open, international Northwest Passage, by which Uncle Sam meant an American-controlled Northwest Passage for U.S. freighters through the melting arctic ice. One of the announced programs proposed to study changes to the Canadian cryosphere -- the snow, glaciers, ice caps, and lake, river, and sea ice found in the region. One report spoke of the atmosphere, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the cryosphere. Cryosphere = cryo- from κρúος Greek ‘frost, icy cold’ + σφαîρα Greek ‘ball’ Σφαîρα was borrowed from Koine Greek into an early Late Latin form like sphera or sphæra and thence into Old French esphere/espere and appeared in English by the 13th century. At first in English the word sphere referred to the globe of space enclosing the earth and the ‘ball’ of the planet as well. Nowadays, sphere often denotes a specific component of the earth in words like lithosphere from lithos Greek ‘rock.’ The lithosphere is the outer part of the earth made of rock. The hydrosphere is the watery portion of earth and the atmosphere is our vaporous surround of air and gases. Lately cryo- is a prolific combining form. Cryobiology examines components of living things and their function at colder temperatures than their normal. Cryosurgery, as the distinguishing part of its medical armamentarium, employs surgical instruments that work by applying deep cold to a body part. Cryonics is a dubious commercial enterprise that deep-freezes dead bodies in the hopes of being able to bring them back to life at a later date. For example, if the deceased citizen expired of a presently incurable disease, then perhaps in the future the citizen can be revivified and cured? A Moist Resurrection Among the scientific drawbacks to this dampish second coming, facilitated by what the freezer boys term ‘cryonic suspension,’ is the fact that, when a flash-frozen corpse is unfrozen, almost every cell membrane in the cadaverous body is ruptured, having been partially destroyed during the freezing process itself. Thus, when Uncle Ned is warmly awoken from his frosted sleepy-bye-bye, Ned is not going to sit up pertly and begin singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The cryogenically preserved Uncle Ned is much more likely to melt into a distressing protoplasmic Slushie that will alarm the children, frighten the household pets, and, should you place him on the verandah for extended family viewing, bring down property values like you wouldn’t believe. Among the notables presently reposing in the gelid bliss of the snowbird seat are Walt Disney and baseball player Ted Williams’ severed head. We’ll conclude today’s modest cryological excursus with this plaintive quotation from a sports writer’s report just after the death of Ted Williams: “What would Ted Williams have thought if he knew his body would be hanging upside down in a nitrogen-filled tank with perhaps four other full bodies and five heads at a cryogenics lab inside a strip mall in Scottsdale, Arizona.” One can only paraphrase the famous Goya engraving of 1799. The sleep of reason produces your dead granny as a Corpsicle.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
A real cryogenic suspension unit from the Alcor Corporation
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