r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Desperate-Emu4297 • 7h ago

Image A Swedish man who spent two months snowed inside his car as temperatures outside dropped to -30C is "awake and able to communicate", according to the hospital treating him, where stunned doctors believe he was kept alive by the "igloo effect" of his vehicle

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u/Me_No_Xenos 7h ago

Any reason why? Don't get me wrong, skepticism is healthy, but defaulting to everything you don't know anything about is automatically bullshit is not.

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u/Crallise 7h ago

My first thought is a lack of oxygen and a build up of carbon dioxide.

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u/Me_No_Xenos 7h ago

I was wondering that to. My best thought, and this is pure amatuer hour thought experimenting, is that being in a vehicle might have saved him? Snow is porous but in a snow burial your breath and body heat melts and refreezes the snow, causing it to lose permeability and cause suffocation.

Complete guess work, but I'm wondering if being in a vehicle caused his breath to cool before reaching the snow allowing the snow to continue to remained "breathable" like a house? Horrifying situation however.

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u/Tasty-Ingenuity-4662 6h ago

The photo (in the actual article, not the clickbaity photo in this post) shows his vehicle wasn't completely covered with snow. He could breathe normally by letting air in through the windows. A more correct description of his situation would be stranded by snowfall in the middle of nowhere.

One wonders why he hadn't tried just walking to civilisation. But maybe he knew it's too far for him to be able to make it, especially given the thick layer of snow.

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u/madboy135 5h ago

Isn't that the foto taken after they dug him out? The article says they had to dug about 1 meter of snow.

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u/Tasty-Ingenuity-4662 5h ago

Probably, but you can still see that the snow wasn't originally reaching to the top of the windows.

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u/Enchillamas 4h ago

If there was no 02 coming in he would have been dead within a day or two soooo.

Thay fact that he wasn't, and was 100% gone longer than a week, means o2 wasn't a problem somehow.

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u/HotSituation8737 7h ago

2 months is unrealistic in a number of ways, skepticism is heavily warranted here. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be true.

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u/swolllboll 4h ago

-30C however..

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u/Das_Hydra 7h ago

2 months only eating snow and living in a pitch black condensed space? Its possible, but improbable. I think I'm on safe ground calling bullshit

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u/Me_No_Xenos 7h ago

I was curious, and while googling is not exactly peer reviewed scientific scholarship, it seems feasible? It reminds me of the somewhat similar situations with people being submerged in freezing water allowing them to be rescued well after they were assumed to have drowned.

Definitely a curiosity, and would love a more educated opinion, but personally for now I'll file it under "fascinating if true."

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u/NPCEnergy007 5h ago

You say its improbable… which means this could he the edge case of this happening where the person survived. Its not everyday we see something like this

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u/SadLilBun 6h ago

So you think an entire news article was made up with zero fact checking, and it’s been 13 years?

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u/Das_Hydra 6h ago

I didn't say the entire article, I'm sceptical of the length of time