Thank you for mentioning that, Jay!
I myself do experience system "panic" when the CPU overheats. When the CPU reaches an internal "safe" threshold (not specified by me), it simply triggers a Motherboard power-down, no system "shutdown" action. The next boot forces an fsck on all partitions. 
That happens when the CPU is under intense load. So, I implemented a mechanism to control and hold the CPU frequency at 75% of max(discussion here and custom script here), but even then, Core Temperature creeps up into the "danger" zone (over 80 C for me) if it is doing something like a video format conversion using HandBrake. Thankfully, HandBrake has a "Pause" function that I use when the temperature creeps up too high, in order to allow that Core temp to drop back to a safer value.