How low can you go? (Image: NASA)

Small dips in the snow atop the Antarctic plateau have set new records for the coldest ever surface temperature on Earth, a distinctly chilly -93.2 °C.

“This temperature is almost as far below the freezing point of water as boiling water is above [it],” said Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at Boulder, Colorado, at a meeting yesterday of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Scambos and his colleagues analysed 32 years of thermal imaging data collected by NASA’s MODIS and AVHRR satellite instruments and high-resolution images beamed back by Landsat 8.


The record was set on 10 August, 2010, when the surface temperature plummeted to -93.2 °C. Another pocket dropped to -93 °C on 31 July, 2013. These record lows occurred in small dips in the ice along a 1000-kilometre section of the ridge that stretches between Dome Fuji and Dome Argus, two of the summits on the East Antarctic ice sheet.

The temperatures are a few degrees colder than the previous lowest measured air temperature of -89.2 °C, set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station. Air temperatures are about 1 to 2 °C higher than surface temperatures so Scambos is confident that the air temperatures in these newly discovered pockets would easily beat Vostok as the coldest places on Earth.

“I’d be willing to bet that I could set out some stations within a couple of hundred kilometres of the Chinese base [7.3 kilometres from Dome Argus] and have an air temperature measurement that surpassed the Vostok record,” Scambos told New Scientist, adding: “Hopefully, nobody will ask me to do that because it is rough work.”

Dangerous to breathe

The air is so cold that it’s dangerous to breathe it directly. Instead, those who do brave the elements here often breathe through snorkels that pass through their jackets, allowing the body to warm the air. “The snow makes a tremendous amount of noise when you walk on it,” said Scambos. “It sounds like you are walking on crushed glass, because it’s very firm compared to what we are used to.”

The researchers used the high-resolution Landsat images to determine the topography of the ice sheet and understand the mechanisms causing the low temperatures, which occurred towards the end of a sequence of clear days. The cloudless skies helped radiate heat to space, cooling the air atop the ridge. The dense, cold air slid down the slopes and got trapped in small depressions in the ice. Had it not been for these pockets, the dense air would have kept on sliding down the slope. But lodged inside them, the air continued to lose heat, further cooling the surface beneath to record lows.

Could climate change and greenhouse gases have an impact on these temperatures? Scambos doesn’t think so, at least in the short term. “I think the meteorological variability is going to be a much bigger factor in setting a particular record for the foreseeable future than the increase of CO 2 ,” he told New Scientist.