The 5 Coldest Places on Earth
Now that it's warming up outside,
we can finally admit that, polar vortex or not, we could have had it
worse. Here are five bone-chilling places that are far more frosty than
anything we experienced over the past few days.
1.
Oymyakon, Russia
-- The small town of Oymyakon, is the coldest permanently inhabited
town on earth, Located deep in Siberia, in a valley that only lets wind
in from the north and that gets as little as three hours of winter sun
daily, Oymyakon was the site of the coldest temperature recorded outside
of Antarctica: in 1933, the town hit minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Right
now, Oymyakon is in the relatively balmy minus 30s, making it a great time to visit.
2.
Vostok Station, Antarctica
--
The South Pole is, of
course, a forebodingly frigid place. It currently holds the record low
air temperature of minus 128.5 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded at Russia’s Vostok Station in 1983. However, that record may have been broken by a 2010 satellite measurement, which noted a ground temperature of negative 136 degrees Fahrenheit along the East Antarctic Plateau. With temperatures like that, the seventh continent isn’t the kind of place you’d want to be stuck at for too long.
3.
International Falls, Minnesota
--
Located just below
the United States’ border with Canada, International Falls prides itself
on being the “icebox of the nation” — so much so that it went to court
to defend its right to the name. Although temperatures in International
Falls were in the negative 30s this week, and have gone as low as
negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit (which is, coincidentally, also negative
40 degrees Celsius), the town has no plans to cancel its annual Icebox
Days Winter Festival. Scheduled for next week, the festival will feature snow sculptures, races, and frozen turkey bowling.
That’s the kind of celebration you just won’t find in uninhabited
Prospect Creek, Alaska, which was home to the lowest temperature ever
recorded in the United States: negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
4.
Winnipeg, Canada
--
While Winnipeg is frigid, it’s hardly the coldest place in Canada. That honor may go to the abandoned village of Snag, Yukon, which recorded a temperature of negative 83 degrees Fahrenheit in 1947, or to the still-inhabited First Nations town of Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories, which recorded a low of negative 79 degrees Fahrenheit in 1910.
However, Winnipeg made headlines on New Year’s Eve when the Manitoba
Museum noted that temperature readings from the city were, for most of
the day, lower than those coming from the Curiosity Rover on Mars. While other Manitobans
were quick to point out that having a lower temperature than Mars is no
great feat — equatorial regions of Mars can get into the low 80s in the
summer — the fact remains that Winnipeg winters are nothing to mess
around with.
5.
Espoo, Finland
--Despite the fact that it’s located in a Nordic country, Espoo,
the second largest city in Finland, actually has a relatively temperate
climate, with winter lows reaching only into the 20s. However, Espoo is
home to Aalto University’s Low Temperature Laboratory, which was able to cool a piece of rhodium to the lowest temperature ever recorded
in laboratory conditions: 100 picokelvins — that’s 10 billionth of one
degree Kelvin — above absolute zero. The feat was accomplished by
magnetically aligning the nuclei of the rhodium atoms, which probably
felt as done with the whole thing as we have with the recent weather.
