Flash Frozen!

[Perpetual Man]

There's this idea that is bouncing around me head.

It's one of those that just wormed it's way in and seemed to be little more than a flimsy excuse for a story - it might have made a short but not much bigger.

But then it began to link with other ideas that have been filling the vacuum for a while, and I might have the basis of something to come back to. In a few years. Or millennia.

We all know when you freeze something (using food as the example) it last for a couple of months and then you are meant to throw it out, even though it might look much the same as when you put it in there.

But how long would something last in extreme conditions?

I'm talking something that was frozen quickly (in ice) but was rapidly buried under millions of tonnes of snow and ice. Would it remain frozen for centuries? Thousands of years? Millions of years?

Or would it degrade?

Fossilise but in ice rather than rock?

Anyone have any ideas?

[Perpetual Man]

As an aside, I know a few years back they discovered a herd of mammoths in Siberia (I think) that had somehow been buried impossibly quickly in a mass of silt, mud and ice - scientific term 'muck.' Honest.

It happened so fast, so suddenly that the creatures were preserved in the act of whatever they were doing, with flowers in their fur, food in their mouths.

Once they were opened to the air they degraded very, very quickly.

So I know a few thousand years is possible, but I'm thinking pure ice...

The mammoths impressed me so much I wrote a short novel on it. It's under the wardrobe, helping level the floor out.

[Vertigo]

I think but I'm not sure that if the ice is cold enough and stays that way permanently then stuff can last a very long time.

There's a very comprehensive answer to the question "have people eaten frozen mammoth meat?" here: http://askville.amazon.com/true-Russ...uestId=9276097

Now I can't comment at all on the veracity of that answer (for those who don't want to visit the link the answer was essentailly "unlikely") but it appears well researched and plausible.

One interesting point he brings up, and I have heard this elsewhere, is that when the frozen mammoths appear out of the permafrost there is evidence of animal scavengers taking some of the meat.

Another point to be aware of is that, even frozen, the meat will slowly dry out. All these ancient frozen remains are also very dessicated.

[James Coote]

I think it depends what it is in.

If in permafrost, which is basically just buried in frozen earth, then it mummifies, just as with mammoths. In fact, there is a wooly rhino at the back entrance of the natural history museum, which I think may actually be millions of years old, rather than just tens of thousands (don't quote me on that). It's all just skin and bone though. No hair

If in a glacier, I'd guess that eventually, as in the case of otzi , the glacier spits you out at the other end. At which point you probably start decomposing.

There are different ways in which stuff gets fossilized, but I think in all cases, still being frozen would mean it isn't possible

[Shane Enochs]

Just putting in my two cents here: ice destroys cellular tissue, which is why cryogenics doesn't work the way it does in sci fi.

[Venusian Broon]

Ok, using Wikipedia, but at least it's sourced:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryopreservation


To headline it and for those who don't want to read the article:

Cryogenic storage at very low temperatures is presumed to provide an indefinite, if not near infinite, longevity to cells, although the actual “shelf life” is rather difficult to prove.

Goes through the risks and difficulties of the process too.

[Sapheron]

Originally Posted by James Coote

In fact, there is a wooly rhino at the back entrance of the natural history museum, which I think may actually be millions of years old, rather than just tens of thousands (don't quote me on that).

You don't want that quoted for sure. Whoolr rhino's have a range from 350 to 10 thousand years ago, so one that was millions of years old must have been doing something funky with time travel and stuff.

More on topic, if you chill something cold enough, fast enough, then you could preserve it almost permanently, as links and comments from others have said. I don't have much more to add on that. I did, however, notice your comment in the orginal post, PM. You mention being buried and fossilising, and at that my inner (and outer... well, all the way through really) geologist started paying attention. Anything buried under that much other stuff is going to get squashed. Doesn't matter if its frozen or not. It won't fossilise though, as there's nothing coming in and doing stuff to the fossil. Most fossils dug up are really casts made of calcite, quartz, pyrite and other minerals, and its unlikely these are moving around and doing stuff inside an ice sheet.

[James Coote]

Recently, the oldest known woolly rhinoceros fossil was discovered from 3.6 million years in the Himalayas on the cold Tibetan Plateau, suggesting it existed there during a period of general climate warmth around the earth. It is believed that they migrated from there to northern Asia and Europe

I think I was getting confused with the above (quoted from wikipedia)

[Perpetual Man]

Thanks folks, all a great help. Greatly appreciated.

So...

In a little more detail: The Antarctica. Used to be a primeval wonderland, now it's buried in ice. If and I mean in a plot device so massive that it may well beggar belief, some of the denizens of that world survived long enough to get caught up at the bottom of the ice - ie: dinosaurs of some descriptions how well preserved would they be?

And no I'm not thinking alive...

[Venusian Broon]

The bottom of the ice, you mean a dino sitting frozen at the bottom with the weight of a 1.6 km thick (on average) ice sheet on top of it?

First guess is it's not really that dino's day.

Second guess (and if we are sticking to scientific orthodoxy) is that he'd be pretty flat. Actually probably chewed up and smeared across the Antartic rockscape under the ice sheet. Especially as ice behaves a bit like a fluid and moves about (just a lot slower than room temperature water.) And I can't think of a mechanism for making the frozen Dino to move up in the ice column to escape being crushed (as more and more snow will pile on top, forms ice and presses down more weight over time...)

[MstrTal]

I maybe misremembering but if I recall correctly someone did try to eat some of that mammoth meat and got food poisoning. It was in one of the APA or Science Journals I came across for one of my non-history classes while doing research in the library. Like mentioned above when exposed to the air the mammoths started to degenerate or decompose rapidly.

But hey remember this is fiction even a flimsy basis if written plausibly and well will garner readers!

[Vertigo]

Originally Posted by Perpetual Man

Thanks folks, all a great help. Greatly appreciated.

So...

In a little more detail: The Antarctica. Used to be a primeval wonderland, now it's buried in ice. If and I mean in a plot device so massive that it may well beggar belief, some of the denizens of that world survived long enough to get caught up at the bottom of the ice - ie: dinosaurs of some descriptions how well preserved would they be?

And no I'm not thinking alive...

Unfortunately I don't think that will work for dinosaurs, but maybe some later animals. The ice sheet didn't form over Antarctica until around 34 million years ago. The extinction event that ended the reign of the dinosaurs was around 65.5 million years ago. So it doesn't look like the timing is going to be quite right for you.

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

Originally Posted by Perpetual Man

There's this idea that is bouncing around me head.

It's one of those that just wormed it's way in and seemed to be little more than a flimsy excuse for a story - it might have made a short but not much bigger.

But then it began to link with other ideas that have been filling the vacuum for a while, and I might have the basis of something to come back to. In a few years. Or millennia.

We all know when you freeze something (using food as the example) it last for a couple of months and then you are meant to throw it out, even though it might look much the same as when you put it in there.

But how long would something last in extreme conditions?

I'm talking something that was frozen quickly (in ice) but was rapidly buried under millions of tonnes of snow and ice. Would it remain frozen for centuries? Thousands of years? Millions of years?

Or would it degrade?

Fossilise but in ice rather than rock?

Anyone have any ideas?

You have to remember, Perp, that the cold only puts microbes-with the possible exception of viruses-to sleep, not kill them. You also have to remember that over thousands of years, if those microbes survived, if you tried eating anything from such a scenario, you probably wouldn't be able to handle them.

The issue here is not whether it would remain "frozen" as it would, given the right conditions, but "preserved."

In some cases, certain anaerobic environments, such as honey, can last indefinitely if they are properly sealed and kept from the air. Flesh, however, is the very thing that microbes love the most, and there's been times we've gotten meat that would still be able to be handled when they went in the freezer but come out stinking like a sewer. Of course, such situations probably mean the freezer was not working optimally, but you're meant to throw things out after a certain period for a reason.

[Perpetual Man]

Thanks once more to everyone who took the time to respond.

Everything is very useful, although it does rather knock the key idea on the head. Just as well the whole thing was not one of my main projects - although I was starting to come up with some rather strange thoughts!.

As a whole a lot of what has been said I should have known, but the way my brain works these days I would not have put it together in a thousand years.

So not quite wanting to lay the idea to rest:

What I need then is a way to find a preserved dinosaur, from then to now. (I'm not talking about alive!)

The initial idea for this was just a random image of a dinosaur preserved in a block of ice and it sort of intrigued me, so I just played around with the idea. But is it possible?




Of course I'm also aware that should I wish to I could create a totally impossible fantastical explanation and with a debonair wave claim it's only fiction....

[Venusian Broon]

Originally Posted by Perpetual Man

So not quite wanting to lay the idea to rest:

What I need then is a way to find a preserved dinosaur, from then to now. (I'm not talking about alive!)

The initial idea for this was just a random image of a dinosaur preserved in a block of ice and it sort of intrigued me, so I just played around with the idea. But is it possible?

Off the top of my head...what you need is a process that creates a really huge volume of conifer resin (sticky stuff that comes from trees if that's not its name) Dino walks along, get's completely covered head to toe - then volcanic eruption quickly covers landscape in millions of tons of other stuff.....millions of years go by, more stuff added on top and rock layers form, resin gets squeezed into a vast crystal of Amber, tastefully set with Dino in the middle.

Found by us in modern times.


Ok, probably absolutely implausible. But hey, an idea of sorts


Next, what about inventing 'time pockets', very, very rare natural pockets of spacetime where time ceases. Hence preserving what was in it. It would sort of be just outside spacetime in a way, so we as temporal beings could never see it, only when it pops back. I mean things dissappear all the time: planes vanish in the Bermuda triangle, socks go missing in washing machines, and tales of marathon runners emitting a scream then vanishing totally in front of loads of eye witnesses. Then things do seem to arrive out of the blue: paperclips in a desk drawer, ghosts, household bills. Why not a dinosaur?