Pole of Cold
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The Poles of Cold are the places in the southern and northern hemispheres where the lowest air temperatures have been recorded.
Southern hemisphereEdit
In the southern hemisphere, the Pole of Cold is currently located in Antarctica, at the Russian (formerly Soviet) Antarctic station Vostok at Template:Coord. On July 21, 1983, this station recorded a temperature of Template:Convert. This is the lowest naturally occurring temperature ever recorded on Earth. Vostok station is located at the elevation of Template:Convert above sea level, far removed from the moderating influence of oceans (more than Template:Convert from the nearest sea coast), and high latitude that results in almost three months of civil polar night every year (early May to end of July), all combine to produce an environment where temperatures rarely rise above Template:Convert during summer and frequently fall below Template:Convert in winter. By comparison, the South Pole, due to its lower elevation, is, on average, Template:Convert warmer than Vostok, and the lowest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole is Template:Convert.
It is generally thought that Vostok is not the coldest place in Antarctica, and there are locations (notably, Dome A) that are modestly colder on average. The now inactive Plateau Station, located on the central Antarctic plateau, recorded an average yearly temperature that was consistently lower than that of Vostok Station during the 37-month period that it was active in the late 1960s, with its average for the coldest month being several degrees lower than the same statistic for Vostok. Plateau Station never recorded a temperature that surpassed the record low set at Vostok. However, temperatures at Plateau Station were only recorded during the 37 months that it was active. Had a lower temperature than the Vostok record occurred there at a later date, it would never have been recorded.
Monitoring stations in Antarctica are few and far between; prior to 1995, Vostok was the only research station on the Antarctic Plateau above the elevation of 3,000 m (with the exception of Plateau Station during the brief period that it was active in the 1960s), with no other stations for several hundred kilometers in any direction. Temperatures below Template:Convert, if they did occur elsewhere, would not have been recorded. The automatic weather station at Dome A was only installed in 2005, and has recorded Template:Convert as the coldest so far (2010). However a review of satellite measurements taken between 2010 and 2013 found several places located along a ridge between Dome A and Dome F which recorded even lower temperatures of Template:Convert, with the lowest reliable temperature being Template:Convert recorded in 2010, at Template:Coord, at an elevation of Template:Convert. The extreme low temperatures are found in hollows slightly below the peak of the ice ridge, where cold air gets trapped as it flows downhill, and since the same low temperature ranges were detected at several different sites along the ridge across multiple years, it is thought this may be the lowest temperature achievable under local atmospheric conditions.<ref>Coldest spot on Earth identified by satellite. BBC News, 9 December 2013</ref><ref>Landsat 8 Helps Unveil the Coldest Place On Earth</ref>
Northern hemisphereEdit
In the northern hemisphere, there are two towns in Sakha, Russia that compete for the title of "Pole of Cold". These are Verkhoyansk (located at Template:Coord) and Oymyakon (located at Template:Coord). However the World Meteorological Organization has recognized in 2020 a temperature of Template:Convert, measured near the topographic summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet on 22 December 1991, as the lowest in the Northern Hemisphere. The record was measured at an automatic weather station and was uncovered after nearly 30 years.<ref>WMO verifies -69.6°C Greenland temperature as Northern hemisphere recordPress Release Number: 23092020; WMO, 23 September 2020.</ref>
In December 1868 and then in February 1869 Ivan Khudyakov made the discovery of the Northern Pole of Cold by measuring a record temperature of Template:Convert in Verkhoyansk. Later, on January 15, 1885, a temperature of Template:Convert was registered there by Sergey Kovalik. This measurement was published in the Annals of the General Physical Observatory in 1892; by mistake it was written as Template:Convert,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> which was later corrected. One can still find this incorrect value in some literature. The coldest reliably measured temperature in Verkhoyansk was Template:Convert on February 5 and 7 of 1892.
On February 6, 1933, a temperature of Template:Convert was recorded at Oymyakon's weather station.<ref name="wmo">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> At the time, this was the coldest reliably measured temperature for the Northern Hemisphere. The weather station is in a valley between Oymyakon and Tomtor. The station is at Template:Convert and the surrounding mountains at Template:Convert, causing cold air to pool in the valley: recent studies show that winter temperatures in the area "increase" with elevation by as much as Template:Convert.<ref>See Response of glaciers in the Suntar-Khayata Range, eastern Siberia</ref> The average temperature in Oymyakon has risen about 2.7 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.<ref name="wp111219">Template:Cite news</ref>
On December 22, 1991, the Klinck Automatic Weather Station (AWS) in Greenland recorded a temperature of Template:Convert. The WMO validated the metadata and observations and was able to conclude that the observation was credible in terms of instrument calibration, monitoring of the station and the synoptic situation. The WMO Rapporteur accepted the observation as the officially lowest observed near‐surface air temperature for the Northern and Western Hemispheres.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
See alsoEdit
- List of weather records
- Lowest temperature recorded on Earth
- Life in the Freezer
- Coldest place in the universe