Was reading about Oetzi again the other day, which started a strange line of thinking:
If a human body–or better yet, a metal object roughly the same mass/size as a human body–were deposited on top of a glacier and could be kept at 98.6F indefinitely (say, by an embedded uranium/plutonium RTG), what would be its course through the glacier?
Would it melt its way down to bedrock in short order? (Days? Weeks? Millennia?) If so, would it then be swept away with the bottommost layer of meltwater, or slid along like a moraine boulder? Or would the mass of all that cold ice easily suck away the heat and disperse it harmlessly, leaving the object essentially as stationary as any cold body?
How many watts?
To keep the bod uniformly at 98.6, you’re going to have to accept its being suspended in a cavity of warm water. That’ll probably be less dense than ice, so it’ll ‘float’ on top of the glacier.
Well that cavity of warm water is denser than the ice, and the body will displace only it’s own weight (the excess volume sticking into the air, so the cavity with the floating body in it will tend to sink.
Have you ever seen a rock on top of a snow drift? The rock has no internal heat source, but it does pick up more heat from the sun that the ice/snow around it. Those rocks do sink down into the snow drift. Because the heat is dependent on the sun, they rarely go any deeper than just below the surface, but it provides a good thought experiment.