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Originally Posted by Icelander
Granted, the sky pirates were freezing even clad in enough wool and furs for medium encumbrance in just -30° C a few hours away, they'll probably be hard pressed to even survive -92° C, let alone fire their weapons.
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They're going to get badly frostbitten before they get into air that cold. Those temperatures really are brutal.
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Ignoring any possible magical effects, if it's around -80° C on the surface in Kadath some distance away from the pillar, what kind of temperatures ought there be in tunnels below the surface? Assuming there are any heat sources, even if only ghoul and nightgaunt body heat, it has to be somewhat warmer, right?
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Ice is a
fairly reasonable conductor of heat, about the same as soil or stone.
A few "living" creatures won't add significant heat to the tunnels. Looking at the
calculations for permafrost, Kadath has been frozen for at least a million years, correct? If so, the natural permafrost depth would be about 700 metres, and that would be the depth at which geothermal heat raises the temperature to freezing point. Since thermal conduction is essentially linear, that would mean you'd gain about 1°C for each (700/80) metres of depth, which is about each 9 metres of depth. So 36 metres down, the temperature would have risen from -80°C to about -76°C, which doesn't make a huge difference.
There seems to be something in or below the pillar absorbing heat, yes? That's likely to make it colder with depth, at least within a few hundred metres of the pillar.