The snowshoers wear clothes designed with low conductivity to prevent heat flow out of their bodies. Convection carries some heat to them, but most of the air flow from the fire is upward (creating the familiar shape of flames), carrying heat to the food being cooked and into the sky. In the illustration at the beginning of this chapter, the fire warms the snowshoers’ faces largely by radiation. A less obvious example is thermal radiation from the human body. An obvious example is the warming of Earth by the Sun.
(The matter is stationary on a macroscopic scale-we know that thermal motion of the atoms and molecules occurs at any temperature above absolute zero.) Heat transferred from the burner of a stove through the bottom of a pan to food in the pan is transferred by conduction.