Lest some of you don’t recognize the reference and think I’m some kind of a freak, the question is about a scene in the movie Snowpiercer. I saw it a couple of years ago when it was on tv and I tuned in just as some dude’s arm was thrust through a hole in a train that’s speeding through (I’m assuming?) subarctic temperatures. They then bring his frozen arm back inside and hit it with a sledgehammer. I turned the channel after that and tried to stop thinking about it.
Now they’ve made a tv series and it seems I can’t go an hour without seeing the commercial, featuring a woman getting the “cold shoulder”
Would that really work? I don’t know why, but it disturbs the hell out of me; much more than any blood and guts stuff.
First of all, the limb would only freeze on the surface. The inside would remain thawed.
Second, the limb wouldn’t shatter.
You could kill the limb with a severe case of frostbite, but even if you left the dude completely outside until the body froze solid, he’s still not going to shatter.
Interesting. Somehow it’s comforting to know it’s strictly Hollywood magic; kind of takes the ick factor out of it for me. I definitely didn’t know it had been done in other stories / movies.
Season 1, Episode 23 of the X-Files (titled “Roland”) featured this trope, where a guy was murdered by having his head shoved in a vat of liquid nitrogen, then he’s left to shatter on the lab floor.
Here’s a still of the guy getting shoved in the vat.
I’d expect that before the arm got frozen enough to shatter, the person would already be dead. Blood is going to keep the whole body at close to the same temperature.
I don’t know how long this turkey was frozen, but it didn’t shatter completely. On an episode of “Bones” the turkey just bounced. And in my own experiments with liquid nitrogen on overtime at work, I’ve never seen anything shatter yet.
“Stay the blazes home” - Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia
Seems to me substances that shatter, e.g. glass and ice, have nothing to hold them together but a crystal lattice. While a fully frozen limb may have a superficial resemblance, being hard and solid, it has quite a bit more to hold it together — bone, muscle, tendons, etc. It may feel like ice, but it’s not built like ice.
Grapes will kind of shatter if frozen in liquid nitrogen. Not into a million pieces, but into large chunks. Might differ with time spent in the liquid though.
That’s the first problem. If you’re going to freeze the arm and not kill the person, you’re going to have to stop the blood flow, which means the arm is already dead and pretty close to being detached already. Maybe you could put a really strong tourniquet on, wrap the person in heating pads, and put their arm in liquid N2 for an hour or four and get the arm frozen and the person alive, but with that level of effort, why not just saw the thing off after the tourniquet is on? (freezing the amputated limb afterwards is optionall)
Yes, it’s a matter of structure. IIRC, one of the traditional examples of shattering using liquid nitrogen is with a rubber ball. But not just any rubber ball, it has to be the kind made of small pieces of rubber (plastic) compressed into a mold. So it doesn’t shatter like ice. And ice isn’t all that shatterable either, a block of ice the size of a man’s arm isn’t going to turn into smithereens from a single hammer blow. OTOH, hit an unfrozen piece of tempered glass just right with just a tap and it will shatter into bits.
I think that was the first time I was exposed to that trope. I still remember the outline of the corpse on the floor: ending in a jagged line, with some smaller circles, dots and crosses emanating from that.
Does ice get more brittle as the temperature decreases? That’s really the question here, I think. If not, then a cadaver frozen with some cryogenic method won’t be any more brittle than one frozen in a regular freezer.
