On a winter morning in 1980, a man named Wally Nelson in Minnesota discovered the body of his girlfriend lying in the snow just a few feet from his front door.
Nineteen-year-old Jean Hilliard’s car had broken down on the way back from her parents’ house after a night out. Dressed in a winter coat, gloves and cowboy boots, she set out in the middle of the night in minus 30 degrees Celsius to call for help.
The woman’s body was frozen for hours, but she came back to life
At one point, he stumbled and lost consciousness. For six hours, Hilliard’s body lay frozen in the cold.
“I grabbed her by the collar and pulled her onto the porch,” Nelson recounted years later in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio. “I thought she was dead. He was frozen solid, but I saw some bubbles coming out of his nose,” he added.
Had Nelson not been on hand, Hilliard would have joined the thousands of deaths attributed to hypothermia each year. But she survived.
Extreme hypothermia is not necessarily the end of a life, it seems. Under controlled conditions, the drop in body temperature can cool the metabolism and reduce the body’s need for oxygen.
George Sather, the doctor who treated her, said, “The body was cold, completely frozen, like a piece of meat you take out of the freezer.
But just a few hours after rewarming, Hilliard’s body came back to life. She quickly began talking and was released shortly after.
Unlike many other elements, water occupies a larger volume when in a solid state. This expansion does not help the human body remain intact.
An important question in this case is what exactly “ice” means in this case. Hilliard’s body temperature, while low, was still well above freezing.
The fact that the surface of her body was cold and white and her eyes seemed glassy may also be a bit surprising. The body closes off the channels to the blood vessels under the skin to keep the organs functioning, to the point where it turns a gray color.
So it seems that the human body has a fantastic conservation ability, even under extreme conditions. Of course, this property does not apply to all people, and scientists are still studying this phenomenon and consider it a mystery.