14 DAY TRIAL // A new series of investigations based on the most detailed global surface temperature maps ever developed have revealed that the coldest spot on our planet is located in the East Antarctic Plateau, on a ridge that can experience temperatures as low as minus 92 degrees Celsius (-133.6 ºF) in the winter.
The maps on which this discovery is based were created by combining more than 32 years of satellite data in a single dataset. Information gathered by multiple satellites were used for this investigation, including data from the Landsat 8 spacecraft.
This particular satellite represents the result of a collaboration between the American space agency and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The remote-sensing spacecraft is capable of monitoring a variety of aspects related to land use around the world.
The new finding was presented yesterday, December 9, at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held in San Francisco. The presentation was held by expert Ted Scambos, who is a lead scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), in Boulder, Colorado.
A careful analysis of the 32-year data record revealed that the extremely low temperatures recorded at the eastern Antarctic ridge were not a one-off event. Multiple times, the research team observed how minimum temperatures dipped at a number of locations around the ridge. The lowest temperature was recorded on August 10, 2010, during the southern hemisphere winter.
The previous record was set at the Russian Vostok Research Station, also in eastern Antarctica, where temperatures during the winter dropped to – 89.2 ºC (-128.6 ºF) in 1983. For reference, the coldest inhabited areas on Earth, the Siberian towns of Verkhoyansk and Oimekon, experienced temperatures of -67,8 ºC (-90 ºF).
“We had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and colder than Vostok because it's higher up the hill. With the launch of Landsat 8, we finally had a sensor capable of really investigating this area in more detail,” Scambos said at the conference.
In order to ensure the quality of the data, Landsat 8 readings were confirmed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on the NASA Terra and Aqua satellites, as well as by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instruments on multiple NOAA satellites.
“By causing the air to be stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space, you get the absolute lowest temperatures we're able to find,” Scambos explained.
“We suspected that we would be looking for one magical site that got extremely cold, but what we found was a large strip of Antarctica at high altitude that regularly reached these record low temperatures,” he concluded.