weather

The Limits of Oymyakon

November 30, 2009

The following post can give answers to many questions regarding Oymyakon, the Pole of Cold in Siberia. The author of the post is Jordi Marqui, a Catalonian cold weather enthusiast, who has its own WP blog AmazingSnow. The article was initially published on my partner blog ColdUnited.com. Thanks, Jordi!

Talking about Ojmjakon involves talking about the cradle of the cold, at least one of the few cradles of the planet. It is known that the -71.2°C is there, like a record, but probably won’t be satisfactorily demonstrate.

I expose a graph below, courtesy of forum collegue (rs), very involved in monitoring global temperatures, which shows us the detail of the number of days (since 1943) per year that Ojmjakon has reached (even exceeded) the -60ºC. As seen at first sight, and within natural variability, the powerful years to achieve this figure are from some time ago, with the decade 1985-95 as the least conducive to these rigors. In recent years, since 2000, seems to appear the 6 again, not with the frequency of periods that are obvious in the graph, but not staying at an impossible figure as in the aforementioned decade.

Ojmjakon -60

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In the beginning of November 2009, I wrote the post “Descending into the world’s deepest shaft in the permafrost zone.” In a few days after I received a message with a lot of questions from a Hungarian scientists Adam Soereg.

Ice hole in Yakutsk

He wrote “Data from Yakutsk is extremely important, because this is the longest dataset in the Eastern Siberian region, longer than any series in the United States. Yakutsk shows an abnormally high rate of warming since the early 19th century, but what if the official values used by large agencies between 1829 and 1854 are 1.9°c lower than reality?”

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Another portion of questions regarding Oymyakon, the Pole of Cold, I received from a Hungarian journalist, who was also wondering how people could live in such extreme weather conditions. Read more…

It’s now, actually. If to be more accurate, the best period for such visits is from the midth of December till the end of January. It is the very time to feel -50°C and less even in Yakutsk. Check out the table and my recent photographs. Read more…