the story
People who were at the airport could clearly hear dogs barking in town and townspeople talking as if they were close by instead of being five kilometers [three miles] away.
Yukon, northwest Canada, saw a cold period from January 17 to February 5, 1947, with the lowest temperature of -64°C (-84°F) on February 3.
Gordon Toole, a weather watcher, found out what the coldest temperature was at Snag’s small airport. He used a thermometer that didn’t go below -62.2°C (-80°F), so he had to mark an extra line to keep track of it. Because it was too cold for pens to work, he had to use a set of dividers to scratch it on the temperature.
At those temperatures, people’s breath changed into a white powder in the air and made a tinkling sound as it did so. Even though that sounds like a lot of fun, if you stayed outside for more than a few minutes, your skin would freeze and you could get very cold.
One of the stranger impacts reported by inhabitants of Snag, Yukon, where temperatures were the lowest, was that sound seemed to travel differently. As he measured the temperature at the airport, Toole’s vision was obscured by a cloud of frost fog. Despite this, he could hear dogs barking in the main settlement about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) distant, while ice cracking in the White River approximately 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) away “cracked and boomed loudly, like gun fire.”
Why these strange sounds?
Temperature affects sound travel. If you’re near the ground, sound travels further in the cold. Warm air over cold air refracts sounds toward the surface. The sound bounces between the ground and heated air, going further than in warmer temperatures.
Senior climatologist David Phillips of Environment Canada told the National Post that a temperature inversion made sound waves bend back toward the earth rather than escape above. Despite being five kilometers (three miles) distant, passengers at the airport could plainly hear dogs barking and people conversing as if they were nearby.
People in the town could hear talks from miles away, and the icy fog made it hard for them to see. They could also see clouds of their frozen breath hanging in the air for minutes at a time, which made them feel even more disoriented.
Toole told the website Canada’s History that it was unusual to see a smoke trail several hundred yards long following a person as he walked around outside.
“It didn’t matter if I got lost. Each breath of an observer as he went up the runway stayed as a little, immobile mist behind him at head level. These patches of human breath fog lasted three to four minutes before dissipating in the quiet air. When one observer returned along the same road 15 minutes later, he saw such a trail still indicating his journey.”
If they had been lost, they could have simply whispered it and been heard by a search and rescue squad many miles down the road.
