Nasa Found The coldest Place in Earth : It is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where
temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit
(minus 92 degrees Celsius) on a clear winter night. Scientists discover the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data
from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of
NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of
pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji.
That is several degrees colder than the previous low of minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C), set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. The coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth is northeastern Siberia, where temperatures in the towns of
Verkhoyansk and Oimekon dropped to a bone-chilling
90 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 67.8 C) in 1892 and 1933, respectively. Theye had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and
colder than Vostok because it's higher up the hill," Scambos said. "With the
launch of Landsat 8, we finally had a sensor capable of really investigating
this area in more detail." The team compared the sites to topographic maps to explore how it gets so
cold. Already cold temperatures fall rapidly when the sky clears. If clear skies
persist for a few days, the ground chills as it radiates its remaining heat into
space. This creates a layer of super-chilled air above the surface of the snow
and ice. This layer of air is denser than the relatively warmer air above it,
which causes it to slide down the shallow slope of domes on the Antarctic
plateau. As it flows into the pockets, it can be trapped, and the cooling
continues.The quest to find out just how cold it can get on Earth -- and why -- started
when the researchers were studying large snow dunes, sculpted and polished by
the wind, on the East Antarctic Plateau. When the scientists looked closer, they
noticed cracks in the snow surface between the dunes, possibly created when
wintertime temperatures got so low the top snow layer shrunk. This led
scientists to wonder what the temperature range was, and prompted them to hunt
for the coldest places using data from two types of satellite sensors.
That is several degrees colder than the previous low of minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C), set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. The coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth is northeastern Siberia, where temperatures in the towns of
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| The coldest place on earth is in the East Antarctic Plateau, but not at the highest peak. Rather, the coldest spots develop just downhill from a ridge that runs from Dome A to Dome Fuji. |
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News Comes From : NASA