In 1947, Yukon reached -63 C and a scientist began hearing conversations three miles away
During a cold early morning in February 1947, meteorologist Gordon Toole left his home covered up to the eyelashes in clothing. He lived in Yukon, Canada, one of the northernmost and coldest areas of the American continent, but that morning something was different. Not only was it much colder than normal, but I heard the barking of some dogs coming from the town.
This would not be strange, If only the small town where the barking came from wasn’t four miles away..
That morning, Yukon woke up to a frigid atmosphere, as if winter had breathed its last breaths, causing a strange auditory effect in the area. Somehow, people could hear noises happening miles awayas if they were only a few meters away.
The coldest day
The view was terrible, the cold hung over the Yukon and, if we had walked around, we would have only been able to appreciate what we had a few steps away. But Gordon Toole was able to perceive the strange auditory effect that the weather was causing. He seemed to have the most powerful ears on the planet. One of the things he managed to capture was the breaking up of the ice on the White River, located 1.6 kilometers from your location. “It broke and boomed loudly, like gunshots.”, Toole would say shortly after.
It was too cold, Tool knew that, but how low? He looked at the thermometers he had in his place and noticed that they all registered the minimum possible marked by his metrics. He rushed to call his colleague, Wilf Blezard, whom he convinced to return to the research headquarters to help him estimate the temperature. Using the tools in his laboratory, Blezard calculated that they must be around -63.8°C.
The protocol is to mark the temperature record with ink, but in many areas of Canada they live with the cold so much that they know that below certain temperatures the ink does not flow, so they proceeded to record the measurement with a file. A few months later, they corrected their record, they were actually at a slightly higher temperature: -63°C.
For a long time that temperature was the lowest recorded not only in Canada, but in North America. Although in early 2023, Mount Washington reached a record number with -78°C. However, what continued to intrigue researchers is How could Toole hear the dogs barking in the town? or the cracking of ice at such distances.
The scientific reason
Despite being a surprising phenomenon, climatologist David Phillips seems to have the answer, shared for National Post.
“A thermal inversion caused sound waves to curve toward the ground instead of escaping upward. People at the airport could clearly hear the dogs barking and the residents talking as if they were nearby instead of five kilometers away.”
When the environment is subjected to extreme cold, such as that experienced by Toole and all the people of Yukon that day in 1947, the air it spreads in a slower way. Layers of air with different densities are formed in such a way that a dense mass of air settles on the ground, while the lighter (and warmer) air rests on top, layer by layer.
When sound waves travel through media like this, a phenomenon called refraction is generated, which is studied especially in the field of optical physics and which explains the color of the sky or why space appears to be totally black. Tom Spears, editor of Ottawa Citizen, explains the phenomenon in the following way.
“They bend from air that is less dense toward air that is colder and denser. That means that waves propagating from someone at ground level are refocused toward the ground. “Sound follows a curved path and travels further under those conditions.”
Added to this is the lack of winds that disperse the sound. These conditions allowed an unprecedented effect which provided an exceptional means of being able to hear what was happening for miles around. In addition, the breath from your breaths when you walked left a trail that followed its emitter for a few minutes.
Innate curiosity
The most surprising thing about this whole scenario, worthy of a horror movie or an arctic adventure, is that it really happened, demonstrating what it could be like to live in territories as cold as the one on that day. It was surely a truly surprising spectacle, worthy of being told in history.
This event remembers the ability of extreme weather to challenge our senses and nature’s amazing ability to create unique and fascinating phenomena. We can reflect a little on this, on how surprising it is the human ability to withstand environments in the most extreme conditions; as well as scientific curiosity regarding various topics, since not all people would feel the need to identify the reason behind the sounds heard coming from more than five kilometers away.