If we managed to enter this impregnable place on the planet, an ordinary mercury thermometer would not help us to measure the temperature, although the rapid drop in our body temperature would do it to the lethal 28 degrees. It is the coldest point on Earth, located in a high mountain range in Antarctica at 90 degrees latitude.
In 2010, data collected by the satellites of NASA and the USGS revealed the existence of air pockets at -93 degrees Celsius. However, that preliminary study had to be revised in 2018 with new data, which showed that the coldest places actually reach -98 degrees Celsius (-144 degrees Fahrenheit), as published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters . Temperatures are observed during the south polar night, mainly during the months of July and August.
These extremely low temperatures require clear skies and the air to be extremely dry as well, because water vapor blocks heat loss from the snow’s surface. In addition, the high elevation of the eastern Antarctic plateau also favors these extreme conditions: the researchers observed that snow surface temperatures regularly dropped below -90 degrees Celsius almost every winter in a wide region of the plateau, more than 3500 meters above sea level. Within this broad region, they found that dozens of sites had much colder temperatures. Almost 100 places reached surface temperatures of -98 degrees Celsius.
The researchers observed the ultra-low temperatures in small drops or shallow gaps in the Antarctic ice sheet, where cold, dense, descending air collects above the surface and can linger for several days. This allows the surface, and the air above it, to cool even more, until the clear, calm and dry conditions break down and the air mixes with the warmer air in the atmosphere.
The record of -98 degrees Celsius is the coldest that can be reached on the Earth’s surface, according to the researchers. For the temperature to drop this low, clear skies and dry air must persist for several days. Temperatures could drop a bit lower if conditions lasted for several weeks, but that is extremely unlikely to happen.
The lowest air temperature ever measured by a weather station, -89 degrees Celsius, was recorded there at Russia’s Vostok station in July 1983. But weather stations cannot measure temperature everywhere, so they are required Satellite data to determine ultra-low temperatures, which belong to the surface of the snow, not the air above it.
In contrast, the warmest place detected on the planet , also through satellite observation, is the Lut desert, in southeastern Iran, which reached 70 degrees Celsius in 2005.
