Nice plan, except for the fact that the good doctor forgot a little technical detail.IIRC, spraying a salt solution on ice will make the ice melt by lowering the freezing point for the mixture (which is why you use salt in winter on roads).
In fact this plan was already advanced once with a different purpose in mind. During WW 2, the British were faced with the problem of providing air escort for the supply convoys traversing the North Atlantic route, and having to do so without aircraft carriers, so someone put forward the idea of cutting ice shelves about 3 by 1 miles in size and spraying them with seawater to make them thicker, to act as floating landing strips. If memory serves me right, there were a couple tests made with the expected disastrous results.
However bad the knee injury seems to be on the CT scans seen on the Discovery Channel article, by itself is not a likely cause of death, and an infectious arthritis of the knee is not by itself a guarantee of 100% mortality, even if it has a 100% certainty of leaving a disabling lesion of the knee. The presumed course of events would be a wound of some kind that introduces a foreign body into the joint space, with a corresponding infectious arthritis, and secondary bacterial spread by invasion of the bloodstream. That is very logical, except for the fact that even untreated wounds do not run this course of events in 3 days, average duration of illness would be in the vicinity of 7-10 days in the absence of antibiotic treatment. To add to this, the skull X-rays in the same article show an extensive fracture of the (left) occipital bone, which suggest a serious blunt head trauma, more than enough to be the cause of death, as well as a small loose bone fragment that appears to come from the base of the skull (that is consistent with the documented practice of extracting the brain through an opening in the base of the skull via the nose). Would be interesting to see the head CT scans....
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Nice plan, except for the fact that the good doctor forgot a little technical detail.IIRC, spraying a salt solution on ice will make the ice melt by lowering the freezing point for the mixture (which is why you use salt in winter on roads). In fact this plan was already advanced once with a different purpose in mind. During WW 2, the British were faced with the problem of providing air escort for the supply convoys traversing the North Atlantic route, and having to do so without aircraft carriers, so someone put forward the idea of cutting ice shelves about 3 by 1 miles in size and spraying them with seawater to make them thicker, to act as floating landing strips. If memory serves me right, there were a couple tests made with the expected disastrous results.
However bad the knee injury seems to be on the CT scans seen on the Discovery Channel article, by itself is not a likely cause of death, and an infectious arthritis of the knee is not by itself a guarantee of 100% mortality, even if it has a 100% certainty of leaving a disabling lesion of the knee. The presumed course of events would be a wound of some kind that introduces a foreign body into the joint space, with a corresponding infectious arthritis, and secondary bacterial spread by invasion of the bloodstream. That is very logical, except for the fact that even untreated wounds do not run this course of events in 3 days, average duration of illness would be in the vicinity of 7-10 days in the absence of antibiotic treatment.
To add to this, the skull X-rays in the same article show an extensive fracture of the (left) occipital bone, which suggest a serious blunt head trauma, more than enough to be the cause of death, as well as a small loose bone fragment that appears to come from the base of the skull (that is consistent with the documented practice of extracting the brain through an opening in the base of the skull via the nose).
Would be interesting to see the head CT scans....