If you thought it was freezing cold when you walked the dog this morning or attempted to start your car to go to work, count your blessings that you don't live on the East Antarctic Plateau. It's the coldest place on Earth, according to NASA, where temperatures can dip as low as minus 135.8 F. That's definitely work-from-home weather.
NASA Earth satellites found that the place with the lowest temperature in the world is indeed on the East Antarctic Plateau, high up on a mountain ridge, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said in a Facebook post on December 16. A satellite picture shows that on the plateau a temperature of minus 135.8 F was measured.
"On a clear winter night, temperatures can drop to 135 degrees F below zero!" the post read.
These temperatures are lower than some seen on Mars, which is much farther from the Sun than Earth. Averages on the red planet gravitate around minus 81 F across the year, ranging between 70 degrees near the equator during the summertime, and minus 220 F at the poles during the winter months.
These kinds of temperature naturally present their share of dangers for humans. At minus 95 F for instance, it takes two minutes of exposure for frostbite to occur, National Weather Service data shows.
Cold weather can be deadlier than heat waves. One study published in 2015 in The Lancet journal, which analyzed over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries, showed that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather.
The coldest temperature previously recorded by satellite sensing was also minus 135.8 F, detected along a ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, also on the Antarctic continent, in August 2010.
These temperatures were recorded using remote sensing from satellite, rather than by ground-based thermometers, meaning that they are not considered to be contenders for an official world record.
The record for the coldest ground-based temperature ever measured stands at minus 128.6 F, which was recorded on July 21, 1983, also on the Antarctic Plateau, at the then-Soviet-operated Vostok station. Prior to this record, the previous coldest temperature was minus 126.9 F, which had also been recorded at Vostok station in 1968.
Outside of Antarctica, it can get intensely cold too. The coldest temperature ever recorded in U.S. was in Alaska in 1971, with the mercury plummeting to minus 80 F in Prospect Creek. Of the mainland U.S. states, Montana holds the lowest-temperature record, minus 70 F at Rogers Pass on January 20, 1954.
All the other U.S. states—except Hawaii—have experienced record-low sub-zero temperatures at some point, ranging from minus 60 F in the northern states to a relatively balmy minus 2 F in Florida. Hawaii has never registered a sub-zero temperature, with its record low actually having been measured in the spring: on May 17, 1979, temperatures of 12 F were recorded at Mauna Kea Observatory, 13,796 feet above sea level.
The U.S. is braced to potentially break some of these records, with an Arctic blast heading southwards from Canada in the coming days.
Most of the central and eastern states will be experiencing sub-zero temperatures from Tuesday onwards, the Weather Prediction Center forecast said, with bomb cyclones expected in the northeast during the weekend. "Blustery winds throughout the region are responsible for bone-chilling wind chills, ranging as cold as minus 30 to even minus 60 degrees," the Weather Prediction Center said in a statement.
Alongside the forecasts of biting cold and blizzards, the blustery weather may give way to a white Christmas in many parts of the country, namely in the Midwest and the Northern Plains.
"Parts of Ohio, Indiana, they could very well end up with a higher probability of a white Christmas as well," Greg Carbin, branch chief at the Weather Prediction Center told WAOW 9 News Wisconsin.
"The probability is normally about 10 percent that the DC area will have at least one inch of snow on Christmas Day," added Carbin. "With the pattern coming together the way it is, I'd be willing to bump that up to a 30 percent chance and it could increase pretty substantially here in the next couple of days, depending on what scenario comes out."
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Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more
