What we know about how the human body reacts to cold comes mostly from gruesomely accurate studies that emerged from the Dachau death camp. Nazis tracked Jewish prisoners’ core temperatures as they died in ice water. As terrible as they are, these morally compromised studies have helped doctors understand how quickly the body loses heat in such conditions. Sitting in 32-degree water, humans begin to feel sluggish after only a minute or two. By 15 minutes most people fall unconscious. They die between 15 and 45 minutes depending on their underlying physiology. When the core body temperature
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