Pole of Cold

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pole of Cold is not a single place. It is a title contested by valleys, ice ridges, and remote stations scattered across the most inhospitable corners of the planet. On the 21st of July 1983, instruments at a Russian research station deep in Antarctica recorded a temperature of -89.2 degrees Celsius. That reading became the lowest naturally occurring air temperature ever measured on Earth. But scientists have since pointed to places that are even colder, places where no thermometer has ever been left to run long enough to catch the worst of it. This documentary follows the search for Earth's most extreme cold: the contested records, the stations abandoned and forgotten, the satellite data that rewrote the map, and the two Siberian towns that have argued for over a century about which one deserves the title.

• 2. Vostok and Its Record

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  Vostok station sits at 3,488 metres above sea level on the Antarctic Plateau, more than 1,000 kilometres from the nearest sea coast. That distance from ocean water matters enormously. Oceans act as heat reservoirs, moderating the temperatures of nearby land. At Vostok, there is no such buffer. The station also sits at high enough latitude to experience almost three months of civil polar night every year, running from early May to the end of July. During those months the sun never rises high enough to warm the surface, and temperatures frequently fall below -70 degrees Celsius. Even in summer, the thermometer at Vostok rarely climbs above -25 degrees Celsius. For comparison, the South Pole is typically 5 to 10 degrees warmer on average, largely because it sits at a lower elevation. The coldest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole was -82.8 degrees Celsius, a full 6.4 degrees warmer than the Vostok record.

• 3. The Problem of Sparse Monitoring

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  Plateau Station, built on the central Antarctic plateau, was active for only 37 months in the late 1960s. During that short window it recorded average yearly temperatures consistently lower than those at Vostok, and its coldest monthly averages were several degrees below Vostok's equivalent figures. Yet Plateau Station never beat the Vostok record low. The critical question is what happened after the station went silent. Had a colder temperature occurred there later, no instrument would have caught it. Prior to 1995, Vostok was the only research station on the Antarctic Plateau above 3,000 metres, aside from the brief run of Plateau Station. Hundreds of kilometres of ice separated Vostok from any other measuring point. Any temperature colder than -89.2 degrees Celsius occurring in that unmeasured expanse would simply have gone unrecorded.

• 4. The Satellite Discovery

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  The automatic weather station at Dome A was only installed in 2005, and by 2010 it had recorded a low of -82.5 degrees Celsius. That figure was colder than the South Pole record but nowhere near Vostok. Then researchers reviewed satellite measurements taken between 2010 and 2013, and the findings changed the picture entirely. Several locations along a ridge running between Dome A and Dome F registered temperatures between -92 and -94 degrees Celsius. The lowest reliable reading in that dataset was -93.2 degrees Celsius, recorded in 2010 at an elevation of 3,900 metres. The mechanism behind these extremes is a specific landscape feature: hollows sitting just below the crest of the ice ridge. Cold air drains downhill and pools in these depressions, unable to escape. The same extreme temperature ranges appeared at multiple sites along the ridge across multiple years, which led researchers to conclude that -93 degrees or so may represent the coldest temperature the local atmospheric conditions are physically capable of producing.

• 5. Siberia's Rival Claimants

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  In December 1868 and then again in February 1869, a scientist named Ivan Khudyakov measured a temperature of -63.2 degrees Celsius in the town of Verkhoyansk in the Sakha region of Russia. That was the first documented discovery of a Northern Hemisphere Pole of Cold. On the 15th of January 1885, Sergey Kovalik recorded -67.8 degrees Celsius at the same location, and that measurement was published in the Annals of the General Physical Observatory in 1892. A transcription error rendered the figure as -69.8 degrees Celsius in that publication, and the incorrect value continued to circulate in some literature long afterward. The coldest reliably measured temperature at Verkhoyansk stands at -67.8 degrees Celsius, recorded on the 5th and the 7th of February 1892. Then came Oymyakon. On the 6th of February 1933, a weather station between Oymyakon and the village of Tomtor recorded -67.7 degrees Celsius, just one tenth of a degree warmer than the Verkhoyansk record. That station sat at 750 metres altitude, while the surrounding mountains reach 1,100 metres, creating a natural bowl that traps cold air in the valley below. Recent studies have found that winter temperatures in the Oymyakon area actually increase with elevation by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, confirming just how effectively cold air pools at the valley floor. Average temperatures in Oymyakon have risen about 2.7 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.

• 6. Greenland Takes the Record

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  On the 22nd of December 1991, an automatic weather station in Greenland called the Klinck AWS recorded a temperature of -69.6 degrees Celsius. The station sits at an altitude of 3,105 metres near the topographic summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The reading sat in the data record for nearly 30 years before it was properly examined. When the World Meteorological Organization finally reviewed the metadata and observations, it validated the instrument calibration, the monitoring of the station, and the broader weather situation at the time. The WMO Rapporteur then accepted the Klinck measurement as the officially lowest observed near-surface air temperature for both the Northern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere. The two Siberian towns, Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon, retain their cultural status as the coldest inhabited places on Earth. But the Greenland record means neither can claim the hemisphere's absolute low.