Siberian villages are the coldest places in the world now! Woo hoo!

The only website that gives the full answer to the question, “Which places are the coldest on the Earth now?” is Ogimet.com. Check it!

Currently, the world’s coldest place is Oymyakon (also known as Ojmjakon) in East Yakutia, Siberia / Russia). It’s -46.9C now.

Other top coldest places on the Earth belong to Yakutian (Siberian) villages:

2. Segen-Kyuel’, -46.4 °C
3. Tompo, -44.4 °C
4. Batamaj, -43.7 °C
5. Ust’- Moma, -43.1 °C
6. Curapca, -43.0 °C
7. Verhojansk, -42.9 °C

Do you know what? This winter will be coldest in Yakutia (East Siberia/Russia) definitely, as such lowest temperatures are usual for this region. Cold winter weather dwells in Siberia as well as in Yakutsk, that’s becoming to be recognized as the coldest city in the world.

And, hey, my Siberian city of Yakutsk was mentioned in it. Take a look.

..For further perspective, consider the Siberian city of Yakutsk, where it averaged 40 below zero last week.

Inna Likhachyova, who works at Tour Service Centre in Yakutsk, 3,000 miles east of Moscow, tittered at the idea of 22 below.

“If you plan to come here, you will need a fur hat, fur boots, two pairs of pants,’’ she said. “It is not cold for us, but you might have a different idea of what cold is.’’…

The story contains the video as well. So it is really worth to read.

Coldest places on Earth at WX-Now... and no Siberian settlements of Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon in the top...

A year ago I chatted with Jordi, the Catalonian meteorology fan, who runs an amazing blog about amazing snow, http://amazingsnow.wordpress.com/. Think, he is more than just a climate fan, he is actually a pro. Once he wrote the article Limits of Oymyakon for Cold United. A professional could create such a scientific text only.

So I asked him, whether it is possible to display the chart of the current coldest places weather info on any website and, if yes, how to do that. He said that the lowest for “the moment” was not an easy thing to find.

However, Jordi gave me the link to the weather info website www.ogimet.com, I presume, he was working on its development, and said that the world’s coldest places ranking didn’t work yet at that moment…

A few months ago, I received a message from a class mate, who lives now in Calgary. He provided the link to WX-Now’s Coldest places on Earth page and stated, “Calgary is the second coldest place in the world!” I said, “What?!”

I googled news about Calgary’s “cold” record. They were reporting that, according to WX-Now’s Weather Extremes Top, the Canadian city of Calgary with its -37C / -34F or -39C / 38.2F, whatever, managed to reserve the second position among coldest places in the world. That was funny! Hilarious!

No, no. I was NOT jealous. By that moment, I got pretty tired of foggy dark cold days. I preferred extreme cold weather to move away from my Siberian city of Yakutsk to other places for a while. So, on that day, when Calgary made it to the top, we had long-wished warm weather in Yakutsk, but… it was much colder in Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk.

Why were those Siberian settlements not mentioned in the chart? That fact surprised me much.

Frankly saying, I immediately liked the WX-Now Weather Extreme page, because they finally did, what we, I and Jordi, had talked about before. My first reaction to that website was, “Wow! How cool it is?”

I followed the coldest places ranking one day, then the second day, then the third… Three settlements located in the Siberian region of Yakutia, i.e. Yakutsk, Mirny and Tiksi, were always in TOP 10… and… I realized that Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk are not included in rat races at all.

Hmm. How come? Is it a trick so to give Canadian regions a little chance to enjoy the top “coldest” status? or must there be other or technical reasons, why Russia’s Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk were not listed in the chart?

So I wrote a message to a WX-Now founder with questions.

My inquiry to WX-Now:

“..Your Weather Extreme’s Coldest Places in the World is a great idea. Very often I see my city of Yakutsk in the top chart.

Would it be possible for you to include other coldest Siberian settlements, Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon? That would be more fare, I think, as they are more colder than Tiksi, Mirny and Yakutsk.”

The reply arrived on the next day. That was from David Braverman, WX-Now.

David Braverman wrote:

“Thanks for writing.

We get our information from free sources published by the U.S. government. They, in turn, get free information from foreign governments, such as the Russian Federation. It’s therefore up to the Russian government what information we have available to us.

At the moment, it seems that the Russian government only has information for the city of Yakutsk in that area. If you search for other cities, you may find data from time to time.

I wish I had better news. In later versions of the software, we’ll be looking for more data sources to fill in those gaps.

Thanks again for your question.”

Disclaimer: David allowed to use his answer for the post. Thanks, David, your website is great!

So there are technical and permission issues that make impossible for coldest Siberian places to participate in the competition. That’s really pity.

If you are following WX-Now’s Coldest Places on Earth Chart, just keep doing it and know Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk are not in the list.

UPDATE:

OMG, Catalonians rock! Their coldest places on Earth rating at Ogimet.com (the full version) works now!

The full version of coldest places rating at Ogimet.com

Check the current rating of the world’s coldest places on Ogimet (full version). All possible and even not-expected settlements are included. Great work! Thanks, Jordi.

Polar bears are becoming common in the northern part of the Republic of Sakha-Yakutia, Russia’s Siberia and Far East. They are coming to Yakutia’s Arctic seashore regularly and it is not an extraordinary event anymore.

A decade ago, people considered polar bears’ delving into the region as the sign of bears’ curiousity. Now they come to the mainland for food apparently. Is it the global warming forcing them to penetrate Siberia’s Arctic?..

Take a look at exclusive pictures of polar bears, who recently approached to the weather station in Yakutia, Siberia/ Russia. Initially, the author, Boris Gorokhov, published on the OhotaSakha.ru website dedicated to hunting and fishing in Yakutia… Oh, don’t worry. The photographer is not a hunter and nothing bad happened to Arctic wild animals.

Moscow is celebrating New Year and Orthodox Christmas now. How does the major Russian city look in winter? It is festive, snowy and… Well, you’d better look at Olga Boiko’s splendid photographs of the magic Russian winter.

If you’ve got questions about Moscow to Ogla Boiko, feel free to contact her via the website AskMoscow.com.

By the way, Olga is a private city tour guide in Moscow. Very knowlegable and reliable. She knows almost everything about her homecity!

The Best of Russia is the online photo contest. People are asked to submit their best photographs and show their own Russia. Eventually all collected pictures show the country as it is seen by ordinary citizens, and what they see is the best.

Enjoy more winter photographs.

In the city of Kolomna. By Tatiana Pemova.

Our Russian winter. By Alexander Fleming.

Snow-covered. The village of Lubenkino. By Natalia Molotkova.

St Petersburg. By Alexander Firsov.

With birdth. By Evgeniy Dimitraidi.

In the winter light. By Vladimir Kirillov.

Frost and the Sun. By Igor Medved.

Doves in St Petersburg. By Alexander Berezhnoi.

The village of Petropavlovka. By Sergei Kuzmin.

Via The Best of Russia.

What type of winter are we, residents of Yakutsk, going to have in a month? Temperatures around minus 40 and 50 degrees Centigrade are for sure. Thick fog. Extreme cold weather is a essential part of the daily winter life of the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the world’s coldest city. Some says it is the same, if living in a freezer. Well, maybe. Never been in a freezer

Words won’t be enough to give you a precise feeling. Perhaps, the following winter street photographs I took the last winter will provide you with some ideas. Take a look.

Yakutsk is my hometown. It is the administrative centre of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the biggest Siberian/Russian region.

This year Philips has launched a pretty interesting experiment project. The company gave Philips Wake-up Lights to all residents of Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town, in order to see, if its clinically proven claim of ‘waking you up feeling refreshed’ is still true in the extremes of an arctic winter.

Longyearbyen is the centre of Svalbard on the western coast of Spitsberge and considered also as the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago in southern Adventfjorden.

Well, frankly saying, I have no idea of what cold weather extremes they’ve got in Longyearbyen, but apparently they experience the same lack of sun lights in winter as Yakutia’s Arctic settlement of Tiksi… in the course of four long months. So it is worth to follow the project via its facebook fan page or Flickr pool.

By the way, enjoy more fantastic Longyearbyen pictures!

Resource development has only led to more misery for northern Russia's indigenous peoples, Larissa Abryutina from the Russian Association of the Indigenous People of the North, tells a Laval university conference on the challenges of sustainable development and sovereignty in the Arctic on May 18.

Pollution, alcoholism, poor health care reduce life expectancy to between 40 to 45 years.

QUEBEC CITY — Many of the 280,000 indigenous peoples of Russia’s north are watching their communities and cultures teeter on the brink of extinction as economic hardships force them to leave their homelands and migrate in droves to the city.

Many of those who remain behind have abandoned traditional values and become “profit-driven in their search for compensation for their traditional lands,” Larissa Abryutina of the Russian Association of the Indigenous People of the North said May 18 in a presentation to a conference at Laval University on sustainable development and sovereignty in the Arctic.

Like other speakers, Abryutina revealed a striking irony: that it’s much easier to find bad examples of development and self-determination in the Arctic than good ones.

Abryutina, a Chukchi, is herself a casualty of the desperate choices facing northern Russian indigenous people: a doctor of radiology, she left her home region of Chukotka due to its declining standard of living.

Since the 1990s, and the fall of the Soviet Union’s Communist government, things have gone from bad to worse for northern indigenous people in Russia, Abryutina said.

And their life expectancy has fallen to between 40 and 45 years due to the environmental pollution, alcoholism and poor health care.

Russia was “naïve” to think indigenous peoples would be able to deal with the new capitalist economy, she told the gathering.

Under the Czars, who ruled Russia until 1917, they were left on their own, and only had to pay an annual tithe to their rulers.

Then, the Soviet era brought many changes, including improvements in education and health care, to northern Russia’s indigenous people, Abryutina said.

But Communism also threatened traditional activities, because nomadic peoples were collectivized into farms and communities where Russian was the language of daily life.

Many ended up dispossessed and depressed, with no land or culture.

Then, the economic reforms of the 1990s wiped out all positive achievements by decentralizing administration to the regions left in what became the Russian federation.

These regions lacked the resources to provide even the most basic services in health or education, so many villages ended up deserted and were finally closed down by the government, she said, leaving industry as the leading player.

The Nenets, the most numerous indigenous group in northern Russia, numbering 42,000, have seen gas and oil developers plunder their reindeer grazing territories, damaging the land without providing any compensation or mitigation measures, Abryutina said.

Packs of wild dogs — the descendents of pets left behind by transient workers from the South — now roam the Yamal, terrorizing the Nenets and their reindeer.

Development has also produced contaminated water, and even when industries offered compensation for the damage, locals have “never seen their clean water again,” she said.

Abryutina’s conclusion? Resource development can’t co-exist with traditional activities because “traditional lands become a wasteland of garbage.”

Even among a non-indigenous Arctic people, Icelanders, the bleak economic situation shows the disastrous result of unsustainable economic development.

In Iceland, where banks went belly-up last year because they lacked the assets to cover their debts, many families and businesses now faces bankruptcy and unemployment has tripled.

Ivor Jonsson, a former business professor at the University of Greenland, told the Laval conference that business interests controlled Iceland’s media and educational institutions, leading to a lack of criticism, corruption and today’s economic chaos.

These have been compounded by the recent volcanic eruptions in Eyjafjallajökull, he said.

Greenland’s decision to use resource development as its financial springboard to independence may also backfire if it lacks the social capacity to benefit from the bonanza, other speakers said at the conference, which took place May 17 and 18.

A recent circumpolar study and comparison of six key economic factors in the Arctic highlights the possible negative and positive impacts of resource development, said Gerard Duhaime, a sociology professor at Laval who holds a Canada research chair on comparative aboriginal conditions.

In Russia, resource development led to lower standards of living, but in Alaska, where there has been more redistribution of the money from resource development, the situation is the opposite.

Alaska shows many more positive signs of development, such as higher educational levels, a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality, Duhaime said.

BY JANE GEORGE, NunatsiaqOnline.ca

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