The coldest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth is −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F), measured at Russia's Vostok Station in Antarctica on 21 July 1983. Satellites have since detected snow surfaces near −98 °C on high ridges of the East Antarctic Plateau, but those are not thermometer readings of air temperature, so Vostok still holds the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) record.
The Official Record: Vostok Station, 21 July 1983
Vostok was founded by the Soviet Union in December 1957, during the International Geophysical Year, close to the southern geomagnetic pole. It sits at about 3,500 metres above sea level on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, with roughly 3.7 km of ice beneath it and, under that, the liquid water of Lake Vostok, one of the largest subglacial lakes known.
On 21 July 1983, in the middle of the polar night, the station's thermometer read −89.2 °C. The WMO's Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes, which was set up in 2007 and has been run with Arizona State University, lists it as the lowest reliably measured air temperature on the planet. The reading was taken in a standard instrument screen about two metres above the snow, which is what makes it comparable with ordinary weather observations everywhere else.
Vostok's usual winter is not far off that extreme. Mean temperatures in its coldest months hover around −65 to −68 °C, and even the brief summer rarely climbs above −20 °C. For comparison, the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, at around 2,835 metres, has a record low of −82.8 °C, set on 23 June 1982.
Why the East Antarctic Plateau Beats Everywhere Else
Several factors stack together on the high plateau of East Antarctica, and no other region has all of them at once.
- Altitude. Air cools with height, and much of the plateau lies between 3,000 and 4,000 metres. That alone makes it tens of degrees colder than a sea-level site at the same latitude.
- Months without sun. From late April to August the interior receives no sunlight at all, so the surface loses heat to space continuously with nothing to replace it.
- Extremely dry, clear air. The interior is technically a desert — Vostok gets only a few centimetres of snow-equivalent a year. With almost no water vapour or cloud to trap outgoing infrared radiation, heat escapes efficiently.
- Isolation from ocean heat. The station is more than 1,200 km from the nearest coast, and the polar vortex, a ring of strong westerly winds, limits how often warmer air from lower latitudes can reach the interior.
- Surface inversions. On calm nights the snow chills the air directly above it, creating a shallow layer of extremely cold, dense air that can be 20 °C or more colder than the air a few hundred metres higher.
The coldest readings happen when all of these line up: a long spell of clear, calm weather deep in the polar night. The geography of Antarctica explains why the eastern ice sheet is so much higher and colder than West Antarctica.
Colder Than the Record? What Satellites Found on the Ice Ridges
In 2013, researchers led by Ted Scambos of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that thermal data from the Landsat 8, MODIS and AVHRR satellite instruments had picked up snow surface temperatures of about −93 °C in 2010, along a high ridge running between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji. A follow-up analysis published in 2018, using a longer run of data, revised the lowest values to about −98 °C.
These spots are not peaks but shallow hollows a few metres deep, where cold, dense air pools on still winter nights. They occur repeatedly in the same places, at elevations of roughly 3,800 to 4,050 metres.
Why isn't −98 °C the new record? Because satellites measure the skin temperature of the snow itself, not the air two metres above it. Under a strong inversion the surface can be several degrees colder than the air a person would breathe. The researchers estimated that the corresponding air temperature was probably around −94 °C — still colder than Vostok, but not measured by an instrument on site, and therefore not eligible for the WMO list.
The Coldest Reading on Every Continent
Outside Antarctica, the records fall off quickly with elevation, distance from the sea and latitude. These are the lowest temperatures accepted for each continent or region:
- Antarctica: −89.2 °C, Vostok Station, 21 July 1983
- Asia: −67.8 °C, Verkhoyansk, Russia, February 1892; Oymyakon recorded −67.7 °C on 6 February 1933
- North America (and Greenland): −69.6 °C, Klinck automatic weather station, Greenland Ice Sheet, 22 December 1991 — also the Northern Hemisphere record
- North America (lowest in the continental mainland): −63.0 °C, Snag, Yukon, Canada, 3 February 1947
- United States: −62.2 °C (−80 °F), Prospect Creek, Alaska, 23 January 1971; −56.7 °C at Rogers Pass, Montana, on 20 January 1954 for the contiguous states
- Europe: −58.1 °C, Ust-Shchuger, Komi Republic, Russia, 31 December 1978
- South America: −32.8 °C, Sarmiento, Argentina, 1 June 1907
- Africa: −23.9 °C, Ifrane, Morocco, 11 February 1935
- Australia: −23.0 °C, Charlotte Pass, New South Wales, 29 June 1994
The Klinck reading shows how slowly some records surface. It was logged by an automatic station high on the Greenland ice sheet but only confirmed by a WMO evaluation committee in 2020, almost three decades later, after the station's calibration records were checked. The station stood at about 3,100 metres near the summit of the ice sheet, which explains most of its cold.
Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk: The Coldest Places People Live
No one lives permanently at Vostok; it is staffed by rotating crews of a few dozen people at most. The coldest permanently inhabited places are two settlements in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in northeastern Siberia, which have competed for the title of "Pole of Cold" for more than a century.
Verkhoyansk, a former place of exile under the tsars, recorded −67.8 °C in February 1892. Oymyakon, a village of around 500 people at roughly 750 metres elevation, recorded −67.7 °C in 1933. The WMO treats the two as effectively tied. A figure of −71.2 °C is often quoted for Oymyakon, but it was never an instrumental observation and is not accepted.
Both villages sit in valleys surrounded by mountains, where heavy cold air drains downhill and collects in winter under the Siberian High, a vast dome of dense, dry air. January averages in Oymyakon are around −46 °C. Yet this is a strongly continental climate: in summer the same places can pass 30 °C, and Verkhoyansk recorded 38 °C in June 2020, giving it one of the widest temperature ranges of any inhabited place on Earth. Nearby Yakutsk, a city of more than 350,000 people, is often called the coldest major city in the world; the full ranking is in our guide to the coldest cities in the world.
Arctic Cold Versus Antarctic Cold
If both poles receive the same amount of sunlight over a year, why does the South Pole region hold every cold record? The answer is that the two polar regions are built the opposite way round.
The Arctic is mostly ocean — the Arctic Ocean covered by floating sea ice only a few metres thick. Water beneath the ice stays near −1.8 °C and leaks heat upward, which keeps the air above the central Arctic from dropping much below about −50 °C. The North Pole itself sits almost at sea level. The Northern Hemisphere's coldest readings therefore come from land: the Greenland ice sheet and the Siberian interior.
Antarctica is the reverse: a continent of about 14 million km² covered by an ice sheet averaging nearly 2 km thick, surrounded by ocean. Its interior is high, dry and far from any water. The result is that the average annual temperature at the South Pole, around −49 °C, is roughly 30 °C lower than at the North Pole. Even Antarctica's summer interior is colder than most of the Arctic's winter.
Verifying a Record When Thermometers Fail
Extreme cold is hard to measure. Mercury freezes at −38.8 °C, so polar stations use alcohol-filled or electronic thermometers, and each must be calibrated for temperatures far below those it is normally tested at. At Snag in 1947, the alcohol column fell below the lowest mark on the scale; the observer scratched its position onto the glass, and the thermometer was later sent away for laboratory testing so the reading could be calibrated.
Before the WMO accepts a record, a committee of climatologists examines the instrument, its screen and siting, the observer's notes, and whether the reading fits the weather pattern of the day. Readings from unscreened thermometers, from sensors exposed to radiation, or from estimates — like Oymyakon's −71.2 °C and the satellite skin temperatures — are rejected no matter how dramatic they are. That strictness is why a number set more than four decades ago still stands.
The gap between Vostok and the hottest reliably measured temperature, 56.7 °C at Death Valley in July 1913 (itself a disputed record), is about 146 °C — the full span of conditions the planet's surface has produced in the instrumental era. To see how well you know where these extremes happened, try placing them on the map in the world geography quiz.
