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The 'Poles of Cold' are the places in the Northern and Southern hemispheres where the lowest air temperature was recorded.

Contents

Northern hemisphere

Southern hemisphere

Northern hemisphere

In the Northern hemisphere, there are several places in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia, Russia which vie for the honor to be considered the "Pole of Cold". These are Verkhoyansk (located at ) and Oymyakon (located at ).
In December of 1868 and then in February of 1869 I. A. Khudyakov made the discovery of the Northern Pole of Cold by measuring a record temperature of -82°F (−63.2 °C) in Verkhoyansk. Later, on January 15, 1885 a temperature of -90°F (−67.8 °C) was registered there by S. F. Kovalik, which became the new world record, and still holds the record for the northern hemisphere. This measurement was published in the ''Annals of the General Physical Observatory'' in 1892; however, by mistake was written as -93°F (−69.8 °C), which was later corrected. One can still find this incorrect value in some literature.
On February 6, 1933, an absolute minimum of -89.9°F (−67.7 °C) was registered in Oymyakon, which is marginally warmer than the Verkhoyansk record. This gives Verkhoyansk the right to remain the true Northern Pole of Cold. More recently, an astoundingly frigid temperature of -96°F (−71.1 °C) is said to have been measured in Oymyakon, however it was obtained by extrapolation method rather than measured directly, and thus is not valid as a world record.
However, the conventional practice is to round the measurement to the nearest degree Celsius. In this convention, the two places share the world record of roughly minus ninety (−68 °C). On the other hand, it is not correct to compare the data measured in different years with different equipment and different uncertainties. A more correct procedure is to compare average temperatures over large periods of time. On the average, the temperature at Oymyakon appeared to be lower than at Verkhoyansk during 70 years of simultaneous observations.
Another possible candidate is the isolated settlement of Tomtor, also in Sakha.

Southern hemisphere

In the Southern hemisphere, the location of the Pole of Cold is much more clearcut: in Antarctica near the Russian (formerly Soviet) Antarctic station Vostok at . On July 21, 1983, this station recorded a temperature of −89.2 °C or −129.8 °F. This is the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth.