What is the coldest place on Earth?
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It is not Kurri Kurri in July, it is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 92 degrees Celsius on a clear winter night.
Scientists made the discovery while analysing the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS).
Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, joined a team of researchers reporting the findings on Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
Researchers analysed 32 years’ worth of data from several satellite instruments.
They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau.
The new record of minus 93.2 C was set August 10, 2010.
That is several degrees colder than the previous low of minus 89.2 C, set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica.
The coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth is north-eastern Siberia, where temperatures in the towns of Verkhoyansk and Oimekon dropped to a bone-chilling minus 67.8 C in 1892 and 1933, respectively.
“We had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and colder than Vostok because it’s higher up the hill,” Scambos said.
“With the launch of Landsat 8, we finally had a sensor capable of really investigating this area in more detail.”
CAN YOU SPOT EARTH?
Most of us have seen photographs in which Earth looks like a big, blue marble, but what about a tiny, blue one?
That’s basically what you’ll see in new, stunning images NASA released on Monday.
The above colour photograph taken from the Cassini spacecraft shows the beige rings of Saturn hovering above a tiny, bluish dot, which is Earth.
In this image, Earth is nearly 1500 million kilometres away.
“We can’t see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were then,” Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker said.
“Cassini’s picture reminds us how tiny our home planet is in the vastness of space and also testifies to the ingenuity of the citizens of this tiny planet to send a robotic spacecraft so far away from home to study Saturn and take a look-back photo of Earth.”