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“The boys are glad that we’ve got Snag on the map,” weather officer Gordon Toole told The Gazette in Montreal when a reporter called for comment. Decades later, the village is still on the map, so to speak. Monday, Google paid tribute to the town — and it’s very chilly day — in a doodle.

At that temperature, exposed skin would freeze in less than three minutes, drastically increasing the risk for frostbite, hypothermia and death.

The 16 men at weather station had other problems on their minds though. The nearest women were 465 kilometres away — in Whitehorse, Toole said.

Lighthearted as the response was, it was a difficult day for Snag.

“Residents seemed to move like zombies, afraid to work hard enough to breathe the frigid air too deeply into their lungs,” according to an excerpt from The Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar.

Adding to the strange day, locals discovered that sound can travel much farther in the cold, dense air.

“A temperature inversion caused sound waves to bend back toward the ground rather than escaping upwards,” said David Phillips, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist. “People at the airport could clearly hear dogs barking in town and townspeople talking as if they were close by instead of five kilometres away.”

Toole confirmed that Snag residents could eavesdrop on a conversation more than six kilometres away when the temperature dropped. Ice in the White River also “cracked and boomed loudly, like gunfire,” that day.

To put the freeze into perspective, the coldest temperature ever recorded in Toronto was -31.3 C on Jan. 4, 1981. It was -44.7 C with the windchill. The coldest place on Earth is Antarctica, where it was -93 on Aug. 10, 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Dsf3N_dt1yc

The 7 coldest places on Earth -94.7 C — East Antarctica — August 2010 -89.2 C — Vostok Station, Antarctica — July 21, 1983 -67.7 C — Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon, Russia — 1892 and 1933 -66.1 C — Northern Greenland — 1950s -64.4 C — Yakutsk, Russia — February 1891 -63 C — Snag, Yukon — February 3, 1947 -62.2 C — Prospect Creek, Alaska — January 1971

With files from Postmedia News