Some cold water deaths happen instantly, while others take hours. Learn about  these four separate threats to your life, and how they affect you in different ways.  The first three have one thing in common: they greatly increase your risk of inhaling water and drowning. Click on the highlighted links to navigate to the full sections.  You can also access them from the main menu.

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Cold shock is the first threat to your survival.  It happens the moment cold water makes contact with a large area of your skin.  Not just your face, for example, but more like your entire chest and back. It causes you to lose control of your breathing, stresses your heart, and compromises your thinking. 

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Incapacitation is the progressive cooling of your muscles and nerves to the point where they simply stop working.  First, they get weak, then they get weaker, and finally they don't work at all. At that point, you're just hanging helpless in the water in your life jacket, unable to move your arms and legs.  In very cold water, you can lose the use of your hands in 60 seconds, and use of your arms in minutes.  Incapacitation causes swimming failure.

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Hypothermia involves a drop in your deep body (core) temperature - the temperature of your brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, liver - in other words, your vital organs. By the time you become hypothermic, you're already helpless due to incapacitation.

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Circum-Rescue Collapse appears to be related to an abrupt drop in blood pressure. It can cause unconsciousness and also heart failure.  It's more likely to happen when a badly chilled person is suddenly removed from the water.

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Key Point:  You can drown in the cold shock stage, the incapacitation stage, and the hypothermia stage, but you have to survive cold shock before incapacitation or hypothermia become a survival issue.

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Dig Deeper

  

Acclimation (acclimatization) is a process by which your body gradually adapts itself to cold water through repeated exposure. Through acclimation, it’s possible to greatly reduce or eliminate cold shock.

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Real World vs Lab Test: Cold shock is far more intense in real life than in scientific research experiments.

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