Eli5: How do people not develop hyperthermia when participating in polar plunges?

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Popular travel vloggers, known for their adventures around the world, visit Iceland in the winter and decide to take a polar plunge in a freezing cold glacial lagoon. Despite the shock of the icy water, they both manage to stay in for a short period of time and emerge unharmed. How do they manage to avoid developing hyperthermia?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

First off, you made a small error in your word. Hyperthermia is the body becoming too hot, hypothermia is the body becoming too cold. Hyper- as a prefix generally means higher than and hypo- means lower than.

The key to not getting hypothermia is the amount of time. Simple physics says that two objects that are in contact, but at different temperatures, will eventually equal out at a temperature between the starting two temperatures. On top of that, the body is designed to use energy to keep itself warm. Both of these combined mean a person has probably 30 min to an hour before problems would start to appear.

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