Shatter Me Like Sub-Zero

From the ice-based violence of Mortal Kombat’s Sub-Zero to the body-shattering kills in action films like “Time Cop” and “Demolition Man,” we seem to have this obsession with frozen human bodies exploding into a million shards of ice. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss just how feasible these scenes really are.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we are going to be shattering some ninja's. I
am very excited. So recently we released an episode about

(00:24):
the science and history of a substance called pike crete,
which is a type of composite ice that was researched
in Great Britain and a little bit in Canada during
World War Two as a potential material for building aircraft carriers. Now,
the so called berg ship that that they wanted to
build was made obsolete by changes in other war conditions

(00:45):
before it was ever built, so we don't know if
it would have worked. But the research on pike crete
as a material itself remains very interesting. And so if
you haven't listened to that episode, I would recommend you
go back and check it out now. I think it
was a lot of fun. Yeah, and we also talked
a bit about of Thrones in there, if you need
a little fantasy to encourage you to check that episode
out right. So, the short version is pikerete is a

(01:07):
suspension of wood pulp in water ice, and the ideal
mixture arrived at by Allied Research with something like eighty
six percent watered fourteen percent would pulp, and it had
a number of material advantages as a as a building
material or structural material. Uh This included that the structural
properties of pi crete were less variable and thus more

(01:28):
predictable than regular ice, So if you wanted to make
a structure out of ice, you could understand what you
were working with a lot more predictably with pikerete. But
also pikerete melts more slowly than regular ice. It seems
like the wood pulp content helps insulate it. So you
take the same amount of material of ice versus pikerete,
the pikerete melts a lot slower. Also, pike crete is

(01:50):
much stronger than regular ice. It can withstand heavier loads
and more powerful impacts with less fracture and less plastic deformation.
And one of the reasons it's supposed that pike crete
is stronger than regular ice is that if a crack
forms under pressure or impact, the would pulp fibers prevent
the crack from spreading along the full width of the material,

(02:13):
so it's just far less susceptible to fracture based failures,
It would maybe kind of deform and sag in a
plastic way over time, but it's also less susceptible to
that than regular ices. But anyway, when we were reading
about all this, I immediately thought of a parallel type
of material to pike crete, where various fibrous substances are

(02:34):
enmeshed in a suspension that is by mass mostly water,
and that composite material is our bodies. And I started
to wonder, is the principle that makes pike create resistant
to fracture the same reason that if you drop a
mass of frozen meat on the ground, it doesn't shatter
the way a block of ice would. Now we can

(02:56):
come back to that, but this immediately got my brain
spinning on another question which takes us into some outworld territory. UH. Specifically,
this question is if you froze a human body the
way sub zero does in Mortal Kombat, or like many
other examples we can talk about from from movies and
games and stuff in a bit, could you shatter that
human body with a slick roundhouse kick or would a

(03:19):
frozen human body be resistant to fracture and shattering? And
if so, how far would that resistance go. Yeah, we
actually chatted about this a bit when we recorded the
pi crete episode, but then we ended up cutting it
for a couple of reasons. First of all, for length um,
but then also you wanted to look into it a
little bit more as our call. Well. Yeah, one reason

(03:40):
I think is that the discussion we actually had about
it when we originally recorded the episode was kind of incomplete.
Like we talked about how the wood fibers within the
pi crete and make it resistant to shattering. How this
was probably a reasonable analogy for the frozen flesh of
an animal, which is a composite sort of alloy of
a different kind with lots of materials in meshed in between. Mean,

(04:00):
you know, muscle, fibers, fat, protein, bone, and bone has
its own different components. It's got a collagen protein component
and a mineral hydroxy appetite component. And anyway, for these reasons,
a frozen body might be somewhat similar in its resistance
to shattering. And of course I mentioned this a second ago,
but there's an experience probably a lot of people can

(04:21):
relate to. If you've ever dropped a heavy piece of
ice on the ground, you you know it shatters. It's
just very brittle. It shatters into a million pieces. But
if you drop a similar weight piece of frozen meat
from say six feet in the air, I think you're
very unlikely to see anything that looks like shattering. It's
more likely to kind of bounce a little bit and

(04:41):
might get bruised as it does so, but it's not
going to shatter like glass. Yeah, And it's it's similar
to how the various frozen foods we bring home from
the grocery store. Have you ever opened the box and
you're like, oh, man, I dropped that frozen pizza and
now it's shattered into a million pieces. No, we just
don't see that, right. So something about the contents, the
material makeup of of meat, of animal flesh, of body

(05:05):
parts seems to make it more resistant to fracture than
other you know, suspensions in water would be so our
initial discussion in that episode we we sort of said,
you know, I don't think it's very plausible that you
could shatter a body. But after we recorded it, I
sort of thought some more and I was like, wait
a minute, this really should depend on some more conditions
that we didn't actually get into, Like, so could you

(05:28):
shatter a human body at regular freezer temperatures around zero
degrees fahrenheit or negative eight teen celsius. I think on
a normal circumstances, the answer to that is just no,
probably not so. Initially our answer to this question was
that the sub zero scenario where sub zero freezes you
with a blast device and then kicks you and you
shatter all over the place, that's fairly far fetched. But

(05:49):
what we didn't really get into in our original conversation
was how far this shatter resistance extends. What if you
get the body really really cold, deep into the sub
zero wild, then I think the question becomes more interesting. Absolutely,
and and also if we're going to talk about sub zero,
I mean sub zero is is not just a guy
throwing around some liquid nitrogen. He is supposed to be

(06:11):
a a Linn cou grand Master. You know. He's a magician,
a sorcerer who's using frost magic and martial arts to
battle various gods and cyborgs and other worldly monsters. So
before we we we get back into the science, I
want to talk just a little bit about this obsession

(06:32):
that emerges um. I think largely uh post nine uh
that this idea of bad guys and sometimes good guys
being frozen, partially frozen, and then partially or entirely shattered,
as if they were a piece of porcelain. Now, why
would you trace it to n Well, here's the thing,

(06:54):
and and I'm not entirely it's entirely possible that there's
some of some work prior tonight that features both the
freezing and shattering of an adversary. Certainly you have examples
of things being frozen, enemies being frozen. The classic uh
the Blob comes to mind, right where they the creatures
defeated with the cold. But in terms of of something

(07:15):
being frozen and shattering is key because that's when James
Cameron's Terminator two came out. Yes, and I always forget
how early in the nineties it actually came out. It
always catches me off guard that it was ninety one,
which is, you know, basically the eighties. Oh No, one
was still the eighties. As we've discussed Cannon on this show,
is that the nineteen eighties ended in ninet. In fact,

(07:38):
that the most eighties year there ever was the like
most iconic when we think of everything that is the
eighties was the year nineteen nine. Yeah, I mean is
the culmination of it. Right. So Terminator two, of course
iconic sci fi action blockbuster, famous for a number of reasons,
but it also featured some incredible effects, incredible digital effects

(07:59):
that just you know, changed what we expected in films.
And there were, you know, so many copycats that that
came along afterwards. Uh, some better than others. But there's
this one sequence in particular where Arnold Schwarzenegger's T eight
hundred Terminator freezes or incident accidentally freezes um the liquid
metal T one thousand terminator played by Robert Patrick with

(08:22):
liquid nitrogen. It's like a factory setting for their fight
and an environmental um um you know, hazard of that
fight is a frozen T one thousand. Uh. So Arnold
lifts up his shotgun I believe, uh, fires a one
line a w liner at him as well as a
shotgun shell or a slug or something, and it just explodes,

(08:42):
just just causes the the T one thousand, the frozen
T one thousand, to explode into hundreds and hundreds of
shards of of this froze now frozen liquid metal, which
of course then begins to slowly melt and then reform
into the T one thousand once more. As I remember it,
he shoots him with a pistol. But I could be
a pistol. Okay, that's my memory. I could be wrong.

(09:03):
But also this is definitely when he he uses the
phrase he's learned as still a Vista baby, showing that
he has learned humanity from Edward Furlong. That's right, by
the way, I was reading about this film um Again,
It's been a very long tent since I've seen it,
but there's this weird deleted scene that lines up with

(09:24):
the whole topic of demonic duck feet on succuby that
we've discussed in the past on the show. This idea
in medieval and post medieval um Catholic and Protestant culture,
the idea that you would have these demons that would
disguise themselves as attractive members of the say, the opposite sex,
that would then try and seduce you into sin. But God,

(09:46):
taking pity on the pious uh man or woman, would
and would make sure that the disguise was imperfect. While
this demon might take the form of a beautiful woman,
it wouldn't be able to get the feet right. The
feet would be duck feet, like demonic duck feet. Um,
so there's a way out for the for the pious, right,
So if you're very observant, if you keep your wits

(10:08):
about you, then you would never fall for one of
these like a succubus, because you notice us you've got
bird feet. So yeah, according to the Internet Movie Database,
there's a there is a sequence in the Steel Mill
where the T one thousand um is it's been previously
frozen and then of course exploded, and then it's come
back together and not everything's working properly. It's having difficulty

(10:30):
maintaining its shape and color, like when it touches other materials.
And there's a scene where it's trying to pretend to
be Sarah Connor um and and then John Connor looks
down and sees, oh, it's not Sarah Connor because it
has grotesque liquid metal feet instead of instead of human feet,
right the feet, its feet are becoming the same texture

(10:53):
as the floor that it's walking on, which is a
cool detail. It is, Yeah, but it but it made
me think back to that the idea that the the
the otherworldly alien pretender, uh can't quite get the feet
right on its disguise. Okay, so you think that it's
probably the scene in Terminator to where the T one
thousand gets shattered that spawns these many copycats that come

(11:16):
afterwards and video games movies where everybody is getting frozen
and shattered into a million pieces. Right, like to take
take sub Zero for instance. Okay, a character in the
Mortal Kombat video game. Now, Mortal Kombat, the original arcade
game came out in nine two, which is really too
close to ninety one for it to reflect that Terminator
to death or explosion scene to any significant degree. And

(11:40):
perhaps due to that overlap, you don't see any shattering
action uh in the game really? Uh? Sub Zero can
freeze people and then he can, you know, uppercut the
frozen person in some ice goes flying, some blood goes flying,
but nobody has shattered. Sub Zero's original fatality in that
game is a blatant predator homage rather in which he

(12:00):
rips the opponent's spine out of their body. Okay, so
it was a movie rip off, even an Arnold movie
rip off, but a different one, right. But then uh,
three the following year, we see the ports of this
game make it out to the different home systems, and
this was too violent for Nintendo. Famously, Supernintendo changed the

(12:22):
blood into sweat and and they toned down some of
the fatalities. But they did one really cool thing is
they completely replaced sub Zero's fatality with one in which
first he freezes the opponent and then he like backhands
them and shatters them into a million pieces. Well, that
sounds like one of the few upgrades for the Supernintendo version,

(12:43):
which I had as a child, and like, it was
very odd seeing the the quote blood coming off people.
That was not blood. It was just some weird kind
of gray tan colored liquid flying on every time you
punch somebody. Yeah, I had the I had the Genesis
version of the game. Uh so I had had the blood,
but I remember being a little jealous of that frozen

(13:03):
fatality that sub Zero had. Now it's definitely in the
Mortal Kombat movie, which, dude, if you have not gone
back and watched that masterpiece recently, I recommended it. It
uh really really holds up in the worst possible way.
It's one of those movies with early c g I
where all of the marketing for it bragged about the

(13:23):
c g I, except like I remember the VHS box
said strap yourself in for these amazing morphin sequences. But
then if you look at it now and it's like,
you know, everything has about four corners and it's just
assaulting your eyes with poison. Oh yeah, well this is yeah,
this is so plenty of time to to to really

(13:46):
go after that terminator to uh style and try and
use some of that technology. Paul ws Anderson was the director,
and uh, you know, as weird as some of the
c g I is compared to today, I have to
say the Goro puppet was really cool. They had some
nice practical effects mixed up in there as well. Yeah,
I'll give him that, but that's we're not talking about

(14:08):
Goro today. Goro when we will come back to another time.
But we're talking about sub Zero and that scene does
feature some great free shatter action. I think the moment
that actually made it into the trailer as sub Zero
is fighting some red shirt like he's he's literally fighting
a ninja that's wearing red um and it's not Irmac
or anything, it's just straight up red red shirt ninja.

(14:32):
He's wearing a sign that says I am here to die. Yeah. Basically,
you know what he's there for he's a demo Ninja.
He's here to demonstrate this fatality. So he does a
big leaping kick at sub Zero right as sub Zero
unleashes all this crazy Um you know I have to say,
and this will come into play later. I feel like
there's some really cool like atmospheric stuff going on with
the effects that sub Zero uses here to to create

(14:55):
his ice magic, like he's doing something to the air
and perhaps the moisture in the air there and then
is that Ninja comes flying across the room. Bam, sub
Zero freezes him. Ninja smashes into the wall and just
shatters into a million pieces perfection. Yes, um, so we'll
we'll keep coming back to sub Zero. But that was
was not, by any means the only um copy cat

(15:19):
or um or let's say, it wasn't the only film
inspired by this kind of freeze and shattered death sequence.
You of course had time cop into. Directed by Peter Hyams,
who also directed two thousand ten and Outland, which is
a kind of a a sleazy, not really sleazy, maybe
kind of intentionally seedy sci fi film starring Sean Connery.

(15:41):
Is that the one that's supposed to be high noon
in space. Yeah, it's straight it's a straight up Western
really with Peter Boyle. I think it's the bad guy.
It's ah. I remember digging it when I was younger.
But that's another one I haven't seen in Forever. Time Cop, however,
features a time traveling time cop as you would expect,
played by Jean Claude that damn and a great villain roll,

(16:02):
really a dual villain role, because he plays himself as
like is the present version of himself and a path
version of himself played by the late Ron Silver. And
there's one scene in particular where a hinchman gets his
arm frozen again by liquid nitrogen that just happens to
be there in the space where people are fighting, and
then Jean Klon van Damme kicks that frozen arm and

(16:23):
shatters it. There's actually, uh just involving an arm. I
remember there's a scene in the older version the movie
adaptation of Snow Piercer where a character is punished by
having their arms stuck outside into the cold, and then
it gets pulled back in and it's frozen solid and
they smash it. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good.
More more recent example of the frozen shatter death or

(16:45):
torment sequence. Another big one from ninety three is Demolition Man.
It's Stallone versus Wesley Snipes, and Stallone eventually freezes Snipes
and kicks his head off, which then chatters, Am I
the only person who saw the fur staff of this
movie about five times and never saw the end? Oh no,
I don't think I even saw that much. Is one

(17:06):
that they were showing on like Sci Fi Channel or something,
A lot of it. I guess it must have been.
I just remember like seeing over and over again the
scenes about like introducing the premise that the problem with
the future is that the cops are not violent enough.
Maybe from my from my part anyway, I think maybe
it was prominently featured in the trailer. And since I
never saw the film and only the trailer, that's all
I know about it. I know like the basic premise

(17:29):
and have sort of a general idea about the look
of this future. Yeah. Well, I think it posits that
the whole future is the galleria. It's just the whole
future is like a shopping mall from the nineties. All right,
let's see a few other quick examples. UM saw both
of the film Cube utilize a freezing trap in there

(17:52):
um film Alien Resurrection. Uh, there's a sequence where this
happens to a xenomorph that like escapes and there's a
freezing trap and it matters itself. And then there's one
from two thousand four that I don't think i'd ever
heard of, titled mind Hunters, not to be confused with
a recent television series that's that's actually, you know, quite
quite good. Uh No, this is a different beast entirely.

(18:14):
And there's a crazy sequence that you can find on
YouTube in which a trap, again some sort of liquid
nitrogen powered trap, freezes Christian Slater's characters ankles and then
causes him to snap off of the ankles fall over backwards.
And then I guess he's still freezing as he falls over,
because then he like grotesquely shatters when he hits the ground.

(18:35):
That's rough, man. Now, the one that I I can't
get out of my head is Jason X, which I
know is one of your favorites. Oh yes, Uh, this
is probably my favorite Friday thirteenth movie because of course
Jason X takes place in outer space and there's a
scene there multiple that has a lot of great kills
in it um let of creative kills, Uh, including one

(18:56):
scene in which uh cyber Jason at the point I
think he's Cyberjason. At this point, Um dunks a person's
face into like a tray or a uh that of
liquid nitrogen and then shatters their face by smacking it
into a tabletop. So clearly in the nineties everybody got
the bug. The filmmakers saw it, saw something. They were like, oh,

(19:17):
shattering people, and they were just on the train. They
were ready. Yeah, I think you know, it's it's new.
It's an early death scene to include in your your
violent nineties picture. But then also I have this feeling
that this, this this trope is popular because it also
drives home this this idea about the exaggerated fragility of
the human body. You know, we we see this in

(19:39):
various Turn to Stone tropes. We see it, you know,
quite um, you know, quite tragically. I think we've discussed
in the past on the show of Um delusions in
which one believes their body to be essentially be made
of glass and be so fragile that they don't dare
touch anything. And then you see like the opposite of
it in some action films especially. I think the the

(19:59):
ultimate ex dream of this is the Hong Kong action
film Ricky Oh, The Story of Ricky, in which our hero,
like a lot of heroes in these films, it's pretty
much indestructible. But to just an alarming degree, nothing seems
to hurt him, and when he hurts anyone else, when
he fights back against bad guys, it seems like that
the slightest touch just makes them explode like a bag

(20:22):
of blood. They're just everyone else is just so fragile. Yeah,
everybody else is just vegetable soup. I mean, I seem
to recall a scene where two characters punch at each
other and their fists hit and Ricky splits the other
guy's arm down the middle lengthwise like a Mattock splitting
a log. Yeah. Yeah, basically the human body is just

(20:43):
made out of balsa wood in according to that film. Well,
maybe we should take a break and then when we
come back we can talk about the the actual relationship
between temperature and brittleness. Than all right, we're back now
today again, we're a looking at this question of could
you could you freeze somebody and shatter them like sub zero?

(21:05):
There are some complications to this question. Obviously, this is
not an experiment you could perform ethically on a real person, right,
but you know, you can seek out some analogies. There's
another reason that this question is a little bit hard
to answer if you're just trying to reason from general
knowledge on materials and mechanics and heat. And that's of
course that the body is a complex matrix of different

(21:28):
kinds of materials all stuck together. So you can look up, say,
existing published knowledge on the temperatures where brittle fracture is
more likely to happen in materials like common industrial plastics
or types of steel. But I have not found a
similar chart for animal bodies, and I doubt that there
would be such a thing, because who would do that research.

(21:50):
Maybe you do that research. If you do, let us know.
But in general, there is actually a documented relationship between
temperature and brittleness in many material reals. And this relationship
does extend well beyond the simple transition of water from
its liquid to frozen states. So it's not just the
freezing of liquids into solids. Even once you have you know,

(22:11):
already frozen things as they get colder, or things without
water content as they get colder very often, in fact,
almost always, they tend to get more and more brittle.
So just one example of this, I was looking at
a short, well presented article on on m T. S
website m I T. S ask An Engineer where they
were addressing the question of why plastics get brittle when

(22:34):
they get cold. It was by Peter Dunn and it
was interviewing Greg Rutledge from m T. S Department of
Chemical Engineering, and so they were looking at the concepts
of ductility and brittleness. Now, ductility is the ability of
a material to absorb stress by changing shape without breaking.
Brittle materials react to stress put on them by fracturing

(22:57):
and shattering, and plastics are mostly considered to be ductal
because of the behavior of molecules down at the molecular level.
Often these molecules themselves can stretch, absorbing energy in the process.
But when you add all this together, these molecules can
each absorb energy by stretching, and they can dissipate stress

(23:17):
from loads or impacts, and this ability to dissipate stress
helps prevent fracture. But this depends on the somewhat free
motion of individual molecules. So if you were able to
zoom all the way down to the molecular level of
the material. For a material to be ductal, what you
would want to see is the ability of molecules to

(23:39):
slide past or through one another. Uh. And the analogy
that Rutledge uses here is like spaghetti coated with olive oil. Right,
you cook a bunch of spaghetti and it does not
have any oil on it. Obviously, what's it gonna do.
It's kind of stick together in a big clump. You
try to stir it up and it does not stir easily.
But if you put olive oil on it, suddenly all
the new goals. They can kind of slide around. So

(24:02):
in a material, especially like a plastic, if the molecules
in the material behave this way where they all kind
of stick together in a rigid structure and they can't stretch,
and they can't slip easily pasted or through one another.
When stress is applied at a particular place, the energy
from that stress can't be dissipated by spreading all across

(24:23):
the material. So if the stress is too great and
the energy can't be dissipated, it'll start to create a
crack and then a full fracture. Now, where does temperature
come in here, Well, there's something that is known as
the glass transition temperature, which they point out is the
point where you have an amorphous solid. And this could
be like a glass or it could be rubber. They

(24:44):
also give the example of cotton candy. It's at the
point where that goes from being ductal, like we were
just talking about two, being brittle, where it's susceptible to cracks,
and so each material has its own temperature where that
transition happens. Usually, the temperature for most materials that we
deal with on the day to day is either very

(25:04):
high or very low. So you're not going to really
observe things going through this transition temperature if you're just
doing every day you know, uh, stuff like you're dealing
with a piece of rubber. Normally the stuff you would
do with it does not take it to its glass
transition temperature. So, for example, in the case of tire rubber,
they say that the glass transition temperature is negative seventy

(25:26):
two degrees celsius. You're not usually getting down that far,
so you're not getting to the point where you observe
vulcanized rubber becoming brittle, So we're not used to it,
but it is a totally real part of physics, and
it all depends on the materials. Some amorphous solids can
become brittle at much more manageable temperatures. The article gives
the example of polypropylene, which they say as a glass

(25:46):
transition temperature of somewhere between negative twenty and zero degrees celsius.
And so that's within you know, temperatures you might encounter
out on a cold winter day or even in your
own freezer. And I have noticed this person only when
taking plastic food containers out of the freezer. If sometimes
if you drop them or knock them against something, they
seem much more prone to cracking or shattering than they

(26:10):
than they aren't room temperature. And I have not noticed
a similar difference for glass. But I was looking around
at some other articles, and yeah, it just seems that
for all kinds of materials. Maybe there are a few exceptions,
but for almost anything, if you cool it down really
really cold, it starts getting into territory where it becomes
more brittle. Like there's this term that's often talked about

(26:33):
with reference to metals, which is the ductile to brittle transition.
Uh so, so steel is an example here that undergoes
a ductile to brittle transition. Some compositions of steel, unfortunately
have ductile to brittle transition temperatures that are within the
range of natural fluctuation. So some steel structures can actually

(26:54):
become brittle enough to fail by cracking instead of absorbing
stress by deforming and reforming under like real world conditions
like winter conditions. Yeah, there's there's this case of the
Liberty class cargo ships during the Second World War. This
was a British concept kind of concept constructed by the

(27:14):
US at a low cost for you know, basically a
mass produced cargo option for the war. So they ended
up building thousands of these things. But unfortunately, the metal
of their their holes was observed to fail after exposure
to frigid North Atlantic waters, frigid enough to make the
steel itself brittle. And this was this is due to

(27:36):
some of the issues were discussing already, but also part
of it apparently had to do with the fact that
the holes were welded as opposed to riveted together from
separate plates. And this was also compounded by just frequent
overloading of the vessels themselves. Uh so so Yeah, another
example of what can happen when you take UM UH
to take a ship that is not specifically designed to

(27:59):
maybe throw even like really frigid waters and put them there. Yeah.
And essentially every source I looked at UH seemed in
agreement that this this holds true for almost any material
that what we've been mainly talking about, because most of
the research seems to be in UH in plastics and metals,
you know, things that stuff like glass, things that you
would expect to be researched because they are industrial materials.

(28:22):
But it would also hold true to some extent for
other types of composite materials, things that have mineral content,
things that have proteins in them, and this would probably
include bodies. So at lower and lower temperatures, the ability
of material to shift and reform at the molecular level
continually decreases. The links between molecules become more and more

(28:45):
prone to tiny initial defects spreading into full scale fractures
in their crystal in structure. And if you add a
lot of these fractures at the same time, basically you
get shattering. So I'm increasingly convinced now that Actually, I
think if you've got a body or or a piece
of a human body cold enough, you very well could
shatter it. So the question at this point would be

(29:08):
what is the level? How cold would it have to get?
You know, what is the level? Because is it coldness
that could actually be achieved in reality? And again I think,
just based on what I've been reading, the answer there
is probably yes, and you could. It's at temperatures that
you could actually achieve given something like liquid nitrogen. You know,
the more we talk about this, I would love to

(29:29):
see a scene in like a kung fu action film
where the villain and the hero are about to square
off and then they both notice that there's a tank
of liquid nitrogen behind them, and they're like, whoa, let's
let's go outside. Let's move into a different part of
the factory, because this is just I don't like where
this is headed. It's like the Pucci episode where they
never actually get to the fireworks factory, except this they

(29:51):
just they never get to the liquid nitrogen. Oh man,
there has to be a liquid nitrogen sequence in Itchy
and Scratchy. Oh sure there is, but because they always
flip it around on you, it wouldn't be a straightforward
chattering what would it be. It would be something more interesting. Oh,
probably made into ice and then ground up into ice
cubes that are somehow still alive in the cocktail that

(30:14):
the mouse is drinking. You're joking, but they literally did that.
That's why I did that. Okay, that's what That's why
it comes to me because it's stuck in my mind somewhere. Yeah,
the the eyeball ice cubes become ice cubes in a drink.
There you go. So, liquid nitrogen is a convenient place
to investigate this or I guess it's not a place
a convenient substance with which to investigate this question, because

(30:35):
it's something you can actually get huge tubs of and
in its liquid state, liquid nitrogen is somewhere between sixty
three and seventy seven kelvin or so, which is like
negative two and ten celsius two d ninety six celsius
or negative three forty six fahrenheight to three twenty fahrenheits
sorry for all the numbers, but just wanted to give
you an idea. It's very very cold. It tends you know,

(30:57):
it's boiling at room temperature. If you have a bucket
of liquid nitrogen at room temperature. It's kind of like
if you put you know, a pan of water and
like a six hundred degree oven or something, it's gonna
be it's gonna be bubbling. It's it's it's aggressive stuff
because it wants to convert back into the gas. That's
the same gas that's in the air we breathe. It
is more than the air we breathe. So so this

(31:18):
is very very cold. If you could submerge a person
in liquid nitrogen long enough to actually freeze them all
the way through, I'm starting to get the feeling that
some kind of shattering, maybe not you know, a billion
pieces glass type shattering, but some significant, you know, chunking
off of of brittle shards would actually happen. But anyway,

(31:41):
this is all just theoretical reasoning based on other things
we know about materials. Uh So, so maybe talk is cheap,
Maybe we should look for physical evidence that this has
actually happened in the real world. Yeah, and luckily there
have been people that have experimented with this that have said,
you know what I'm going to get I think of
of with nitrogen, and I'm going to get something that

(32:02):
could stand in for a human head, and we're going
to see what what happens. Yeah. So, but before we
get to direct empirical research, At first I wanted to say, Okay,
is there anything documented in nature? Right? I combed through
a big newspaper database, trying a bunch of different combinations
of search terms to find any evidence I could of

(32:23):
a documented case of a frozen body being shattered. I
found nothing. I found tons of stuff, but nothing like
what we were actually looking for. I found lots of
reviews of movies and TV shows like that one with Christians.
Later you mentioned a bunch of articles about that. I
found a lot of old crime reports involving frozen bodies
and people named shafter. I found a lot of stuff

(32:46):
about frozen seafood and a kind of packaging called a
shatter pack, which I think is terrible name for a
type of packaging. But so, if there is any natural,
documented case of a human body being frozen and then shattering,
I could not find it. Now, the closest thing I
came across was I did find an old Straight Dope
column where the author is trying to answer the exact

(33:08):
same question, can you shatter a body? And finds a
bunch of cases of people being frozen sort of or
exposed to liquid nitrogen in various ways and not shattering,
And the column concludes from this that you probably would
not shatter if you were frozen. But I don't think
any of the cases that the column looks at really

(33:29):
count because it's stuff like somebody gets uh, somebody gets
liquid nitrogen spilled on them, which you know. In fact,
one thing that's it seems to be true is that
you can probably say that, I mean, don't try this
at home, but you can probably safely get a little
bit of liquid nitrogen uh splashed against your skin and
you'd be okay because the light and frost effect immediately

(33:50):
turns it into two gas that insulates your skin from
the freezing cold liquid itself. Now, if you were like
to dip your hand in it or can have continued exposure,
obviously that would be extremely bad. There was one case
documented in the Straight Dope column of a person who
apparently dipped their foot in a container of liquid nitrogen

(34:11):
and kept it there. It's not not quite clear why
this happened, but there was no documentation of that person's
foot shattering, though obviously it was massively traumatic to the body, like,
so don't do that at all, So that column concludes. Quote,
judging from the above, I'm guessing fibrous tissue would prevent
a body from simply shattering no matter what happened. But

(34:33):
then again, okay, so so you could take that and say, okay,
that sort of holds up with you know, if you
drop a piece of frozen meat from the freezer, it
doesn't shatter, So maybe it just wouldn't happen to a body.
But I want to come back with a few empirical,
controlled examples that we can talk about now. I have
not found any controlled studies published in actual scientific journals

(34:53):
about shattering frozen animals or animal parts. Maybe there's something
I haven't dug up yet, but I don't think it's
out there. But I've come up with a number of
informal tests that have been published just some other people's articles,
podcast videos, YouTube and stuff. For example, the Naked Scientists
one time they explored this on their podcast in an
episode from Actually it was an episode that featured recent

(35:17):
show guest Cat Arnie. They didn't freezer, I hope, no. No. Unfortunately,
Cat was not involved in this particular experiment. It was
a couple of the other hosts, but but a couple
of the other hosts didn't an empirical experiment. They explained
as follows. You get some chicken pieces turkey drumstick, you
freeze them with liquid nitrogen and then attempt to smash

(35:39):
them with a hammer. So they pour liquid nitrogen all
over meat inside a bucket, and after being submerged in
the liquid nitrogen for a while, the experimenters believes they've
gotten the flesh down to almost negative two hundred degrees
celsius around negative three forty fahrenheit. And at this temperature, uh, First,
they experiment with just kind of like hanging the frozen

(36:00):
meat against a wood block with the hand or dropping it,
and this doesn't seem to do much of anything interesting.
But then what happens if more forces applied? But if
you you know, hit it harder. This appears to be
the key. When they hit the nitrogen frozen meat with
a hammer, it does, in fact shatter. It splits off
into many small brittle shards like ice or glass. They

(36:23):
say it's a thousand bits of chicken. Oh man, well,
that that sounds like the super a s sub zero
fatality right there. Yeah, and so the host concludes, quote,
it does work, but it's an awful lot tougher than
you might expect. So if you just fell over, you
wouldn't shatter into a thousand pieces. You might crack a bit.
And I think that they are based on everything I've read,

(36:44):
I think they're basically on the money. That brittle shattering
of flesh is quite possible, but it requires a very
very cold piece of meat down to like liquid nitrogen
level temperatures, and it requires a very very heavy impact act. Well,
everything's coming up set zero in this one, because he
has otherworldly ice magic okay, surely capable of reaching those

(37:07):
low temperatures, and is a skilled martial artists who knows
just just where to hit you and how hard to
create this death art that he calls the fatality. So
uh so. And also, if you want to investigate this
for yourself, fortunately, in this age of widely distributed video content,
there's a bunch of video too. You can see it

(37:28):
for yourself, assuming there's no video trickery involved. I think
given the amount of content I've seen like this, that's
you know, it's probably not all explained by video trickery.
So there are tons of videos of people deep freezing
various meats, animal bones, model bodies, and other fleshy objects
with liquid nitrogen and then shattering them. You know, the

(37:49):
internet will provide um. So just mentioning a couple of
examples I found. One of these was a video from
a cooking channel called chefs Steps that was attempting to
cut through a cow femur with a heavy cleaver and
with the femur unfrozen. It takes a bunch of heavy
strokes and like swinging it like an axe. I think

(38:09):
it took at least a half dozen strokes. But when
a cow feemur is frozen and liquid nitrogen, it seems
to kind of explode in a shower of brittle pieces
after one hit with the same clever, and you might think, wow,
even even a cow femur. I mean, that's a really,
really thick bone. But to comment on this, you know,

(38:31):
you might sometimes think of bones as something that is
naturally brittle to begin with, right, it's kind of like
a rock, But bones are actually excellent naturally designed shock
absorbers when a normal temperatures. I mean, think about all
of the stuff you do with your body. That just
doesn't seem quite right. If your bones were actually composed

(38:52):
of say, you know, like rock material of the same
size and shape as your bones, yeah, they they really
are quite quite durable. I guess part of it is
we tend to we tend to only notice them, uh
you know, when they're hurting or broken or bruised. Right,
that's when we we we began to realize, oh my bones, right, yeah, yeah, Well,
you know, a good bone. It's it's like a great

(39:14):
film director is the director. You don't notice great bones
or bones you don't think about because they just do
the job. They're just there for you. And so bones
are not like rocks. They're they're not composed entirely of
brittle mineral content. Instead, they're kind of like a natural
mesh of one part structural mineral but then softer, more

(39:34):
ductile material that can stretch and flex and dissipate mechanical stress.
And I think of the things that that help absorb
and dissipate impact stress on bones. One of them, of course,
is collagen, which is a protein content in the bones.
Is found throughout the hydroxy appetite crystal structure of your bones,
but on a deeper chemical level. I also came across

(39:55):
an interesting, relatively recent finding that's about exactly what's going
on with bones that helps them flex like this. So
it was paper published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of the Sciences inteen by Davies at all I
think it was a team based primarily out of Cambridge University.
But the short version is that they discovered that a
major factor helping bones absorb shock without shattering is what

(40:20):
they call a goog that is trapped in between the
mineral crystals and our bones. And this goo is actually
made of a viscous solution of water containing citrate, which
is interesting. So citrate is a derivative of citric acid.
It's a natural byproduct of sell metabolism. But various forms

(40:40):
of citrates have tons of uses in chemistry, Like one
that I think about in in food uses is a
trisodium citrate. It's one of the sodium salts of citric acid,
and it has a bunch of uses in foods, for example,
emulsified cheese sauces. You know, you ever wonder like what
makes something like Velveta style cheese melts so smoothly instead

(41:02):
of breaking and getting all greasy. It's because it has
a citrate based emulsifier in its sodium citrate. Actually, I
I don't know for sure if Velvita in particular uses
that one, but I know some like processed melting cheeses do.
A good amount of American cheese is going to have
some kind of emulsifier like that. But anyway, so back

(41:23):
to bones, Like within our bones, they've they've got this
fluid citrate that allows molecules to slip and slide past
each other like we were talking about earlier, and this
makes the bones more ductal and less brittle and able
to absorb loads and impacts without breaking nearly as easily
as they would if they were purely rigid mineral structures
like rocks. And there are other interesting videos you can

(41:45):
find too. I found one kind of strange video of
a pig heart submerged in liquid nitrogen, and and it
was left in there until it was deep frozen, and
then it was shattered by being thrown against the floor.
Assuming that's real, that seems like pretty good at it.
And I've seen another one where some people deep froze
a sort of simulated model of a frozen human head

(42:06):
and then they had a boxer smash it with a
heavy punch. It kind of shattered. The damage was reasonably shattery.
So I think I've been convinced. I think the answer
is clearly that while animal flesh, including a human body,
is not very likely to shatter at regular freezer temperatures
like zero degrees fahrenheit or or a negative eight teen celsius,

(42:27):
if you get it really really cold in the neighborhood
of liquid nitrogen temperatures and then you hit it with
a very very heavy impact, shattering becomes a much more
realistic reaction. So anyway, consider me a convert converted to
the ways of sub zero. All right, on that note,
we're gonna take one more break. But when we come back, UM,

(42:48):
I have some additional stuff to throw in about this
idea of shattering ice magic, and uh what else we
could possibly pull out of the natural world to back
this up? I can't thank Alright, we're back, So Robert
hit me with some shattering ice magic. All right, I

(43:08):
have kind of a shattering ice magic. Um, uh, buffet
here a few different offerings here. Uh so, first of all,
there's frost shattering. This is something we mentioned briefly in
the pie crete episode. But one way that we we
naturally see stone shattered via freezing water occurs via frost shattering.

(43:29):
It's a gradual process by which the freezing of water
in poor spaces and joints in rock leads to fragmentation. Okay,
so this is actually caused by the freezing process itself, right,
and the of course the expansion of water in little
cracks and all. Um. You know this this gets down
to like why do we have potholes, right, um, because
you end up with water. And one of the reasons

(43:50):
that you end up with water getting into little cracks
in the road, it freezes, it expands, it shatters the
the stone work there, and then it has to be repaired.
So I don't know how that really helps out sub zero,
but it's worth mentioning. Well, I mean, I think it
is worth mentioning that things with water content in them
undergoes some natural trauma in the freezing process. Like yes,

(44:12):
some some foods that you freeze, um, don't do so
well when freezing, like you saw them out and eat
them later. And maybe something about the texture is kind
of wrong. I mean, like freezing can form crystals that
just harm the cells in the food. Yeah. Now another
idea that comes to mind. This is more of, I
guess a munitions based thing to think about. But you

(44:33):
have dry ice bombs, which you absolutely should not try
and make. They're illegal in places and dangerous. But a
simple but dangerous explosive device can be made using dry ice,
which again dry ice is solid carbon dioxide. Uh and
and and and basically all this really does is just
shows that, you know, there's a lot of power bound

(44:55):
up in the manipulation of the phases of matter, especially
when it comes to the expansion, concract contraction of the
substances in question. Okay, and that's gonna play more into
like my main idea here, and that is Okay, sub
zero he has this ice magic. He's he's a master
of ice. He can make it into weapons, he can

(45:15):
freeze people as they fly through the air. He can
do these complex fatalities. But is he only a master
of ice phase one? Or might he have magical access
to all seventeen types of crystalline ice and three types
of amorphosis that we touched on in our previous episode. Okay,
see the Master of many worlds? Yeah, I mean and

(45:38):
that's just known ice. I think they're in total somewhere
in the neighborhood of three hundred or so theoretical phases
of water ice that could be possible. So the question
that one might raise this might there be varieties of
ice that would prove more advantageous to magical martial arts
than even typical every day ice, which of course is
pretty powerful. We've already discussed how it can. It seems

(45:59):
like it is you can. You can certainly like shatter
a human head, or given enough time, shatter of the
stone face of a mountain with its power. But I
started looking around about about this, my you know, what
other varieties of ice are out there? For example, UM
One that came to mind was what if sub zero
instead of using or just instead of only depending on

(46:21):
phase one UM ice water, what if Heke was also
a master of what is referred to as super ionic
ice or ice eighteen. Now, this is one of the
high pressure ices that can exist in places like the
depths of Urineus and Neptune, and it has been created
in the lab on Earth as well. For instance, in

(46:44):
twenty nineteen, UNI University of Rochester scientist at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California used six giant laser beams
to compress water into this exotic ice form. So this
is this is really weird stuff. And I have to say,
when you read about this, it really bucks you know,
the everyday idea of what ice even is. And it

(47:08):
it also makes you realize like the slim pressure and
temperature constraints that make up the human world and ultimately
are sort of default understanding of reality. Right. So again this,
this is this weird ice. This ice ay teen um
is is is made via extreme pressure. We're talking um

(47:31):
one to four million times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere
and uh and it's it depends on extreme temperatures of
three thousand to five thousand degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, so it
sounds like ice. I know, it's it's really hot, but
um and it's also it's four times as dense as
as normal ice. Um and it's uh, it's hot and

(47:53):
it's also black. And if you were to take this
ice and suddenly expose it to Earth's surface to air pressure,
it would rapidly decompress. Does that mean explode or do
we not know? Well? I couldn't find a write up
that that specifically mentioned explosion. But we know that rapid decompression,

(48:14):
can you know, it's the sort of thing that can
produce UH, something that could be described as an explosion.
So the way I like to imagine it, UH, you
could have sub zero. Feel free um video gamemakers to
steal this for your next video game. But you can
have sub zero manipulates the atmosphere around UH. An individual's body,
then crushes them down to a mass of high pressure,

(48:36):
high temperature black super ionic ice, and then he releases
this magical pressure that he's built up around it, and
then you're crumpled black and frozen. High temperature body would
then rapidly decompress and just explode all over the screen.
I'd like it put it in Mortal Kombat seventeen or
whatever they're on, whichever one's next. Now, a lot of

(48:58):
other ice phases are are are certain a higher density
as well, not necessarily as high density as these, but
you also have some that are lower density. Ice is
as well, both known and theorized, including I think ice
sixteen as an example of that. But I sixteen wouldn't
really do sub zero much good unless based on the
some of the articles I was looking at, unless he

(49:18):
was looking to harvest gas from the sea floor and
transport it in pipes. That's that's one of the main
areas where they see uh I sixteen research as having
a real world benefit. But our universe is home to
forms of ice far colder, such as ice fourteen, which
at around which is roughly I think a negative one

(49:39):
and sixty degrees celsius or negative two hundred and fifty
six degrees fahrenheit. And this is apparently the cod coldest
ice we've yet found in the natural world. And this
too is found on the icy moonsh icy moons, and
outer planets. So I like the idea of sub zero
potentially using that as well. The idea of an ice
sorcerer used ing uh plutonic ice against the occasional literal

(50:03):
thunder god that he does battle with. That is good, Okay.
So here's what I'm thinking, ice warlock and the external
power that the warlock context to get his to get
his power as a being that lives on Pluto. Yeah,
some sort of ice god from the outer reaches of
the Solar system. I mean, where else would an ice
god live. I know, we've been saying we're given out
these ideas for free. Maybe we should just t M

(50:25):
stamp everything. We're saying, no, you can't have it. We're
making this game, all right. Well, I have one more
example to discuss here on on the topic of frozen
things and explosions, because there's the matter of the mysterious
Siberian perma frost craters. To consider craters that, at least
in some photos especially, I was looking at one from

(50:47):
Seen that I included for you to hear for you
to see as well, Joe. It's the crater of what
has been dubbed Yamal Crater from the Yamal Peninsula peninsula
in northern Siberia, and it looks hauntingly like a scene
from John Carpenters the thing. Oh yeah, the ice pit
where the space ship was. Yeah, it's forty Why, that's
a hundred and thirty one feet So it's it's pretty big,

(51:09):
and if you're looking at it, you get the impression
that there's either been some sort of an impact or
there's been an escape, something has been freed from its
icy prison. And this seems to be exactly the case,
only instead of an ancient alien visitor shape shifting its way,
you know, out of the ice and then ultimately out
of the the frigid waste land. Instead, it is methane

(51:31):
exploding out of the permafrost buried natural bombs. Yeah, So
basically think to the frozen wooly mammoth. So the frozen
permafrost is an ice box storing these exceptional cases of
preserved organic matter. But they're also there's plenty of less
exciting stuff frozen in there as well. Since it's frozen,

(51:53):
none of it truly rots, at least not until the
permafrost heats up due to climate change, and as that happens,
the rot finally finds these ancient morsels, releasing carbon dioxide, methane,
and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases. By the way, now
methane explosions are they're not known to be the cause
of the craters, right, It's just a hypothesized possible explanation.

(52:17):
That's my understanding of it. I was looking around at
different articles about it, um because there's other stuff too
that they've looked at. There's something similar seems to have
happened thousands of years ago on the floor of the
Arctic Ocean in places where it seems like methane venting
or even explosions may have occurred, resulting in large craters
some three thousand feet wide apparently. Um. But and then

(52:39):
also we're talking about rare occurrences in remote tundra regions.
So the way this would supposedly work as the frost
would heave up over the course of a year or so. UM.
But then that's ultimately hard to observe. And I also
don't think there have been any actual explosions witnessed. What
you have. Instead, you'll have some you know, some of

(53:00):
the people will find this big crater. There'll be some
accounts from locals about some loud noise they heard in
some cases reports of smoke or flame. But um. But
other than that, like, again, there's no footage of this
occurring as far as I know. And on top of that,
these craters then tend to turn into lakes within a
couple of years and are hard to distinguish from other lakes. Uh.

(53:21):
This according to Vigne Clavillain of the Skull Tech Center
for Hydrocarbon Recovery Man, this is one of those things
where there's so much that's potentially amazing in the world
that just nobody's around to see. Yeah, it's uh so,
as far as I understand, the research is still ongoing
and the scientists are still looking into this. For instance,

(53:44):
researchers are still debating whether permafrost melting is going to
release mostly methane or mostly carbon dioxide of still figuring
all of that out. Well either way, I mean, we
don't want more methane or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
right right. The melting of the perma frost is um
is alarming. Uh, certainly, no matter what the exact ramifications are. Well,

(54:05):
but what does it mean for sub zero um? I
don't know. Maybe nothing, But it could also provide a
mechanism by which a frozen warrior might explode given enough time.
I don't know. It depends how you look at it.
He he generally doesn't let you stand there and rot.
But they do have a fighter now that is a
master of time, So they could like they could they
could like double team um a a corpse and make it,

(54:28):
you know, freeze it and then let it rot and
then it explodes and the time master speeds it up
there so that it does that. That seems like cheating
if you're a master of time. You're just unbeatable, right
even if you if you're about to lose, you always
go back to start over again, I guess. But that's
how video games work, right, So maybe he's perfect. Oh yeah,
he's the living example of safe scrubbing. Yes, yes, well

(54:50):
this one's been fun, Robert, Yes, yeah it has. Obviously.
We'd love to hear from everyone out there about your
frozen food exploits, about your viewing experience with UM with
nineties cinema and the various things that get frozen and
exploded UM or if you have some feedback about our
thoughts on the Moral Kombat franchise, we'd love to hear

(55:12):
from you on that as well. Or do you have
any uh, do you a direct experience of these permafrost
regions we've been discussing here. Perhaps you have some some
feedback there. In the meantime, if you would like to
listen to other episodes stuff to blow your mind, you
can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever
that happens to be. We just asked the rate review
and subscribe huge things as always to our excellent audio

(55:35):
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You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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(55:56):
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