Coming to Alaska – What Is a Plugin for a Car

When you live in the South or somewhere with warm or mild winter, many everyday things of people in the north may not seem obvious on first view. They may even be totally unknown to you because they wouldn’t have a function or use at home. Read this real life story for an answer on “what is a plugin for a car?”, and for entertainment.

Disclosure: There are affiliate links in this post.

A Male Plug Hanging Out of the Hood

When I was the first time in Alaska for my job interview at the university, the wife of the search committee chair had picked me up at the hotel. I saw a male plug hanging out of the hood of her car. Therefore, I said to her “You have an extension cord hanging out of your hood.” She smiled and said “No, it’s just the male plug to connect to the extension cord.” “What for?” was my follow-up question. About 20 years ago, electro cars weren’t a thing except in warehouses. “To plug your car in when it’s cold in winter.”

Plugins Serve to Operate to the Block Heater

I must have made a face like a question mark or so. After a short pause she explained that Alaskan cars have a motor block heater. This heater serves to keep the engine and battery warm so the car would start when it is standing outside in negative temperatures (temperatures below -18^oC).

Then she pointed to the about a yard high (~1 m) poles in the parking lot of the hotel. Due to my jet-lack and stress related to interviewing, I hadn’t even taken notice of them. “See these poles? They are to provide the electricity for the block-heaters. You connect your car with a connection cord to power the block heater. Such connections exist in the parking lots of schools, employers, public buildings and even private residences. Sometimes permafrost causes plugins to stand at an angle – like that one.” She pointed to a pole on the other side of the street. With a sudden, I saw them everywhere, and realized that all cars – including my rental car – had a male plug hanging out of their hood.

She continued “The cord tells us how cold it is.” Because I already had inquired what is a plugin for a car, I put on my poker face to hide my thought “What on Earth is that supposed to mean?”

You Have to Order a Block Heater as Extra When Buying a Brand-New Car

Anyhow, when we bought a new car, we demanded to add a block-heater so we could plug-in.

What She Meant with “The Cord Tells Us How Cold It Is.”

In the first winter, I learned fast what she meant with “The cord tells us how cold it is.” The colder the ambient air, the stiffer the cord becomes. At 40 below, you can hold the about 4 to 5 yards (3.66 to 4.57 m) long cord horizontally, vertically or at any angle in the air like a stick. The cord won’t bend on its own. Therefore, you have to bend it to get it into your trunk, roll it around your side mirror or about the hooks when you have a Wrangler (see photo).

Starting Your Car with a Remote Control

Plugging in your car is not only about getting your car to start in the cold. You could as well idle the engine for ten to 15 minutes every two or three hours. In deed, the majority of people even use a remote control to do so. The remote starts (and stops running) the engine of automatic cars. The owner just goes to the window and points the remote towards their car.

Some car owners plug their cars in and use the remote control to idle the car its inside is already warm when they enter the car.

Plugins Can Reduce Winter Air Pollution

In winter, you see a lot of cars and trucks with diesel engines idling all by themselves in front of stores, in mall parking lots and in front of restaurants. Of course, idling your car means that your car produces emissions. Even worse, running an engine on low load means incomplete combustion. Or in plain English, high emissions.

Speaking of Alaska air quality, did you know that there exists an optimum speed at which emissions are lowest? Above that speed emissions increase again.

When you plug in your car, the block heater warms the engine (and battery). Consequently, when you start the engine its emissions are smaller than when it would start (if at all) at low temperature. Cold-start emissions increase with decreasing temperature. Therefore, plug-ins help to reduce winter air pollution in Arctic and sub-arctic cities.

Definition of Permafrost

Permafrost is defined as a soil layer that stay frozen for at least two consecutive years. The layer above the permafrost starts thawing every spring and refreezes in fall. This layer is called the active layer. In this layer, plants can root and grow. Obviously, the deeper this layer is, the taller vegetation can grow. Consequent, you can recognize permafrost by the look of the vegetation.

What Is the Impact of Permafrost on Construction and Vice Versa

Permafrost is a pain in the neck for any construction. I have written about the relationship of damages from houses built on permafrost vice versa some time ago. Furtermore, permafrost can cause problems when drilling for drink water and can be the source of artesian wells that sprout water even in the middle of winter.

Explanation Why Permafrost Destroyed this Parking Lot

Today’s post is about an annual annoyance by permafrost in the back parking lot of the Geophysical Institute at Alaska’s first university. Nearly each year, students, staff and faculty receive an email from the operations manager that part of the parking lot is closed due to permafrost damage. One year the damage was even so large that you could have easily hidden a car in the whole caused by the permafrost damage.

Where Do Sinkholes Build in Permafrost?

Not entire Alaska is underlain by permafrost. The Fairbanks region, for instance, is an area of discontinuous permafrost. This means there are areas with and without permafrost underneath. Typically south-facing slopes have no or only few small areas with permafrost, while north slopes have a lot or are totally underlain by permafrost. This distribution is due to the amount of insolation an area receives. As you have experienced yourself at the beach, once there is shadow it’s your skin heats up less than when there is no shadow. The heat from the sunshine is conducted into the ground. Heat conduction is the transfer of heat by the molecules of the material. You well know this physical process from your iron pan’s iron handle that gets hot when you fry your breakfast eggs.

What Are the Causes of Permafrost Damage

In case of the parking lot, it is located at the top of a north facing slope. Prior to the area’s becoming a parking lot, it was covered by trees and vegetation. When the lot was paved, it was cut off from water supply by rain and snowmelt from the top. This means that now evaporative cooling doesn’t occur anymore at the top of the soil layer in summer. Furthermore, the pavement heats up much stronger than wet soil and/or vegetation. During summer more heat is transferred into the ground underneath the paved parking lot than it was when the lot was still in its natural condition.

How Does this Degradation of Permafrost Work?

Over time, this enhanced heat transfer increases the depth of the active layer underneath the pavement. The water in the active layer can’t evaporate and stays there until it finds a way to flow away. In this case, the soil layer with a sudden looses part of its mass. Large soil grains and stones remain, while the water takes away small grains (silt). Once the water flows away, the modified soil matrix collapses. The remaining grains and stones sink into the space that formerly was filled by a mixture of frozen water, soil material, and stones. In this process, the pavement, of course, sinks down too.

How To Fix the Damage from Permafrost

The next thing is the closure of the area as shown in the photos and said email is sent. In the following, the parking lot is repaired by filling the sink-whole and repaving the area. However, depending on the size of the permafrost lens underneath, it is just a matter of time when the next permafrost damage will occur due to heat conduction into the ground.

What Happens in Undisturbed Discontinuous Permafrost?

Why didn’t the area collapse with the natural vegetation? I don’t know whether it didn’t happen in the area of the parking lot prior to the land-cover change. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information about it whether this area was a sinkhole before. However, in general, the shadows of trees reduce the potential heating of the ground. You surely have experienced as a kid when running around bare feet that grass doesn’t get as hot as pavement. For these reasons, the heat from sunshine does not penetrate so deep into the ground by conduction as it does under the same sunshine conditions in the paved parking lot.

Of course, you can find places where in a hot summer, a permafrost lens collapsed underneath vegetated areas as well (see photo above). These sinkholes are the reason why many lawns in the Fairbanks area are not plain as the lawn in a German soccer stadium, but bumpy up-and-down like a test and practice path for mountain bikers.

Look of the Day

Now that you know what is a plug-in for a car let’s look another example of how to get more wear out of your wardrobe. Here I am wearing a dress as a skirt by pulling a sweater on top. To imitate the half tuck, I pinned the sweater to the dress.

Tulle Skirt with Utility Jacket Outfit Idea

Now let’s discuss the look of today. I went for a monochromatic look in blush with a midi tulle skirt, utility jacket and slides. The outfit creates a feminine vibe color-wise, but is “toughened up” with the utility jacket and slides. I wore it as an unexpected Casual Friday look without jeans.

References

Mölders, N., 2010, Land-use and land-cover changes: impact on climate and air quality, Springer Science & Business Media.
Mölders, N., Kramm, G., 2009. Permafrost modeling in weather forecasts and climate projections. In: Krugger, M.I., Stern, H.P., New Permafrost and Glacier Research, Nova Science Publishers Inc., New York, 51-88.
Mölders, N., Romanovsky, V.E., 2006. Long-term evaluation of the Hydro-Thermodynamic Soil-Vegetation Scheme’s frozen ground/permafrost component using observations at Barrow, Alaska. J. Geophys. Res., 111: D04105, doi:10.1029/2005JD005957.
PaiMazumder, D., Mölders, N., 2008. Sources of discrepancy between CCSM simulated and gridded observation-based soil-temperature over Siberia: The influence of site density and distribution. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference On Permafrost, Fairbanks, AK, 1351-1357.

Photos of me: G. Kramm
Photos of permafrost damage and equipment: N. Mölders

© 2013-2026 Nicole Mölders | All rights reserved