The Coldest Place in the World

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 26, 7:30AM EDT

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The Coldest Place in the World — © National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association

As global warming pushes temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit across parts of the United States and Europe, temperatures spiked to 120 degrees in some parts of the Middle East. At the other end of the spectrum, one place on Earth posted the lowest temperature on record. It dropped to −128.6 on July 21, 1983, in Vostok, Antarctica. (These are the worst cities to live in as climate change worsens.)
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Vostok is a Russian research station located 800 miles from the geographic South Pole. It is also over 11,000 feet above sea level, which adds to the factors that make cold weather more likely. The location also gets very little snow, so it has been described as one of the driest places in the world.
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Established in 1957, the station houses as many as 30 people, mostly scientists.
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In December, the Vostok gets over 708 hours of daylight, a world record for any month. It gets virtually no sunshine in May, June, July and August. The average low temperature is below −90 degrees from April through September.
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The wind is also a temperature factor. The temperature with wind speed factored in dropped to −200 degrees on August 24, 2005.

The station was considered in disrepair a decade ago. The construction of a new one began last year.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.