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 planet 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 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/Yakutia) definitely, as such lowest temperatures are usual for this region.

A Russian boat RUS in Clyde River, Nunavut. Photo by CBC.ca

Adventure enthusiasts from the Russian city of Ivanovo were reported to be the first sailers, who have crossed the Polar Circle on an air-inflated trimaran. It happened on Aug. 5th, 2011. Last Satuday, their boat called “Rus” have already made it to the Clyde River in Nunavut, Canada.

When Canadians saw their strange-looking 7.6-metre trimaran, they called it as a homemade boat “made out of bamboo, rope and duct tape.”

Here is what CBC.ca wrote:

“Absolutely fascinating. I’ve never seen the likes of it in my life,” said Constable Rolland Lavoie, who’s with the RCMP in Clyde River. “I would expect that a trip of this sort to be on a huge cruise boat, something huge, but this is something out of Gilligan’s Island, for crying out loud. Very Interesting.”

Ok. Who are these Russian sailers?

They are 6 travellers from Russia’s Western city of Ivanovo (mostly known as the city of Russian brides). Their mission is to study the geography and people of the North during their around-the-world Trans-Arctic historical-geographical sailing expedition “The Path of Orion.”

Their way to the Canadian Nunavut was a long journey. They started expedition in the early May from the city of Ples on the Volga River. They reached St Petersburg by the river waterway, then crossed Baltic and Norwegian seas, made it through the Northern Atlantic to Iceland and Greenland. Finally, arrived in Nunavut, Canada.

Now they are travelling through Canada’s Northwest Passage and expect to arrive in Cambridge Bay around Sept. 5. After that their route goes to Alaska and Chukotka, back to Russia.

The Path of Orion Expedition is dedicated to the 140th Ivanovo City Anniversary.

Brave Russians!

Follow them on the Path of Orion expedition wesbite.

BattleHarbour about its video:

What an amazing sight to see! “Small” chunk of the massive Petermann Ice Island. This “berg” is approximately 3 miles long and 2.8 miles wide. Wow, that’s nearly 5 times the size of Battle Island!

Special thanks go out to Port Hope Simpson resident & crab fisherman, Eldred Burden, for capturing this magnificent ice structure. Truly breathtaking!

This part of the Berg has already passed Battle Harbour, but we are still awaiting the arrival of the larger chunk!

A massive ice island that broke off a glacier in Greenland 11 months ago has been winding its way through Arctic waters ever since. Satellites have now spotted it off the coast of Labrador, Canada, MSNBC.com reports,

The ice island was formed when a 97-square-mile chunk of ice broke off Greenland’s Petermann Glacier on Aug. 5, 2010. It was the largest iceberg to form in the Arctic in 50 years.

Petermann Glacier is one of the two largest remaining glaciers in Greenland that terminate in floating shelves. The glacier connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean. When the chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off, the Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile-long floating ice shelf, according to researchers at the University of Delaware.

The Canadian Ice Service has since been tracking the ice island, dubbed PII-A, via satellite and radio beacon.

NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of the ice chunk in the Labrador Sea on June 25.

The island has been slowly breaking up and melting on its more than 1,800-mile journey so far. News agencies reported that the ice island now covered roughly 24 square miles in area and weighed between 3.5 and 4 billion tons.

But even with its diminishing size, it could eventually pose a hazard to offshore oil platforms and shipping lanes off Newfoundland.

Environment Canada dropped a beacon on PII-A on Sept., 17, 2010, to help track the island.

Resource: MSNBC.com.

The IPY 2012 Conference From Knowledge to Action is taking place in Montreal, Canada April 22-27, 2012 and will be one of the largest and most important scientific conferences for polar science and climate change, impacts and adaptation. The Call for Abstracts for oral and poster presentations is now open.

Conference organizers invite you to submit abstracts on the latest polar science, as well as the application of polar research findings, policy implications and how to take polar knowledge to action. The Conference program is available at www.ipy2012montreal.ca

The Call for Abstracts closes September 30, 2011.

NEW Conference Website Launched

Our new conference website is up and running and features the latest information on the development of the Conference program, as well as indepth articles and highlights of polar science news from around the world on our Conference Twitter page (@IPY2012). Please be sure to update your bookmarks to link to our new site.

Iluliaq - Iceberg in the area of Uummannaaq, Greenland. Photo by Galya Morrell.

Apr. 27, 2011 – The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the report that identifies 13 of the richest and most vulnerable places in the Arctic Ocean that should be considered for protection as summer sea ice melts and industrial activity expands into newly accessible areas.

The Bering Strait, Chukchi Beaufort Coast, Barents Sea Coast and Great Siberian Polynya are among the hotspots. Here is the full list of the 13 top priority areas featured in the report:

- St. Lawrence Island,
- the Bering Strait,
- Wrangel Island (off the US and the Russian Federation),
- Chukchi Beaufort Coast (US),
- Beaufort Coast/Cape Bathurst (Canada),
- Polar Pack Refugium,
- Lancaster Sound/North Water Polynya,
- Disko Bay/Store Hellefiskebanke (off Canada and Greenland),
- White Sea/Barents Sea Coast,
- Pechora Sea/Kara Gate,
- Novaya Zemlya,
- High Arctic Islands and Shelf,
- Great Siberian Polynya (off Norway and the Russian Federation).

This is the first-ever Arctic-wide identification of areas most important to Arctic marine life and vulnerable to additional stress on top of that related to global warming, loss of sea ice and ocean acidification.

Full story at IrishWeatherOnline.com

Photo credit: Galya Morrell @ Flickr & UummannaqMusic.com

His grave in 2010.

Today Yakutia’s authority discussed possibility to rebury the remains of German Walter, doctor of the Russian Polar Expedition (info) led by Eduard Toll on the Zarya (Twilight) polar ship in 1900–1903, that was discovered by Shparos’ 2010 Arctic Expedition in a sad condition on Kotelny Island (location info and the map).

Ad notam. In summer 2010, Russian explorer Dmitry Shparo’s Adventure Club embarked the expedition to the New Siberian Islands and found the grave of German Walter on Kotelny Island near the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Russia’s Arctic. It was considerably desolated as a consequence of soil shift and extreme cold weather conditions. Further, you can see pictures of its condition.

Lately, Dmitry Shparo shared his sad finding with the Government of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and stressed on the advisability of reburying the tomb at a safe place.

In reply to his request, Yakutia’s government created the workgroup and concluded to arrange the expedition together with the Shparos to Kotelny Island in July – August 2011, rebury the remains, and install additionally the memorial dedicated to all perished members of Tolls’ Russian Polar Expedition, including native guides Gorokhov and Tungusov.

That’s how the grave looked in 1902.

In below pictures, you can see how Shparo’s expedition fellows reshaped the grave as a temporarily rescue measure and installed the cross.

Photographs by Shparo Adventure Club.

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.

The New York Times is putting a Siberian snow connection to the test. On the opinion page it published the interview with Judah Cohen, the commercial climate analyst at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, who proved that the answer is yes.

Judah Cohen wrote an op-ed article for The Times charting a connection between global warming, snow in Siberia and outbreaks of cold weather in parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

“Cohen points to past successful predictions of winter temperatures in North America and Europe as evidence that autumn patterns of snow cover in Siberia have a lot of relevance to people thousands of miles away. He has a prediction for the remainder of this winter, offering a fresh test of his model,” writes Andrew C. Revkin, a NYT columnist.

The science foundation caption:

“Researchers have validated a new weather prediction model that uses autumn snowfall to predict winter cold in the United States and Europe. When snowfall is high in Siberia, the resultant cold air enhances atmospheric disturbances, which propagate into the upper level of the atmosphere, or stratosphere, warming the polar vortex. When the polar vortex warms, the jet stream is pushed south leading to colder winters across the eastern United states and Europe. Conversely, under these conditions the Arctic will have a warmer than average winter.”

Read the full story on the New York Times website and find answers to the following questions:

- What got you focused on this particular puzzle piece, Siberian snow, a decade or so ago?

- Some scientists and environmental campaigners have been asserting that it’s delayed freezing of sea ice that is the most important influence jogging winter Northern Hemisphere patterns. Given the complexities of NAM/NAO, ENSO, sea ice, and Siberian snow, is it possible to know which are chickens and which eggs – or irrelevant?

- How is the “character” of Northern Hemisphere winters likely to change with continued greenhouse gas accumulation?

P.S. Hey, how much snow do we have in the early winter this time in Siberia? A lot! Does it mean that… It seems that it does!

In this Oct. 23, 2010 photo, Russian scientist Sergey Zimov walks on a Siberian lake near the town of Chersky, Russia, where methane bubbles are trapped under the ice. Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the last few decades, as the Earth has gradually warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane _ a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide _ at a perilous rate. Photo by AP Photo/Arthur Max.

Below is another news story about Sergey Zimov‘s research results.

Who is Sergey Zimov? He is well-known scientiest in my region, the director of the Northeast Science Station in Chersky (see on the map) in the Russian Republic of Sakha in northeastern Siberia.

Mr. Zimov is the most cited by international media. When you hear anything about climate changes’ affects on Siberia’s Arctic, Pleistocene ecosystem in the northern steppes as well as the re-establishment of a grassland ecosystem known as Pleistocene Park in the way of its existence during the Pleistocene period, just know that the major resource of all these newsbreaking stories is Sergey Zimov, a Russian scientiest in the Northeastern Siberia.

This time, precisely yesterday, his scientific computation was featured in Associated Press’ Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue.

Mr. Zimov gave Arthur Max, an AP reporter, evidences to some scientists’ beliefs of thawing permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change as 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, might be a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

Arthur Max’s story:

CHERSKY, Russia – The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.

Gas locked inside Siberia’s frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

“Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together,” says the scientist, Sergey Zimov — “here” being the endless sweep of snow and ice stretching toward Siberia’s gray horizon, as seen from Zimov’s research facility nearly 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle.

Climate change moves back to center-stage on Nov. 29 when governments meet in Cancun, Mexico, to try again to thrash out a course of counteractions. But U.N. officials hold out no hope the two weeks of talks will lead to a legally binding accord governing carbon emissions, seen is the key to averting what is feared might be a dramatic change in climate this century.

Most climate scientists, with a few dissenters, say human activities — the stuff of daily life like driving cars, producing electricity or raising cattle — is overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that trap heat, causing a warming effect.

But global warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed.

Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.

“In my view, methane is a serious sleeper out there that can pull us over the hump,” said Robert Corell, an eminent U.S. climate change researcher and Arctic specialist. Corell, speaking by telephone from a conference in Miami, said he and other U.S. scientists are pushing Washington to deploy satellites to gather more information on methane leaks.

The lack of data over a long period of time casts uncertainty over the extent of the threat. An article last August in the journal Science quoted several experts as saying it’s too early to predict whether Arctic methane will be the tipping point.

“Arctic Armageddon Needs More Science, Less Hype,” was its headline.

Studies indicate that cold-country dynamics on climate change are complex. The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a scientific body set up by the eight Arctic rim countries, says overall the Arctic is absorbing more carbon dioxide than it releases.

“Methane is a different story,” said its 2009 report. The Arctic is responsible for up to 9 percent of global methane emissions. Other methane sources include landfills, livestock and fossil fuel production.

Katey Walter Anthony, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been measuring methane seeps in Arctic lakes in Alaska, Canada and Russia, starting here around Chersky 10 years ago.

She was stunned to see how much methane was leaking from holes in the sediment at the bottom of one of the first lakes she visited. “On some days it looked like the lake was boiling,” she said. Returning each year, she noticed this and other lakes doubling in size as warm water ate into the frozen banks.

“The edges of the lake look like someone eating a cookie. The permafrost gets digested in the guts of the lake and burps out as methane,” she said in an interview in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, en route to a field trip in Greenland and Scandinavia.

More than 50 billion tons could be unleashed from Siberian lakes alone, more than 10 times the amount now in the atmosphere, she said.

But the rate of defrosting is hard to assess with the data at hand.

“If permafrost were to thaw suddenly, in a flash, it would put a tremendous amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We would feel temperatures warming across the globe. And that would be a big deal,” she said. But it may not happen so quickly. “Depending on how slow permafrost thaws, its effect on temperature across the globe will be different,” she said.

Permafrost is defined as ground that has stayed below freezing for more than two consecutive summers. In fact, most of Siberia and the rest of the Arctic, covering one-fifth of the Earth’s land surface, have been frozen for millennia.

During the summer, the ground can defrost to a depth of several feet, turning to sludge and sometimes blossoming into vast fields of grass and wildflowers. Below that thin layer, however, the ground remains frozen, sometimes encased in ice dozens or even hundreds of meters (yards) thick.

As the Earth warms, the summer thaw bites a bit deeper, awakening ice-age microbes that attack organic matter — vegetation and animal remains — buried where oxygen cannot reach, producing methane that gurgles to the surface and into the air.

The newly released methane adds to the greenhouse effect, trapping yet more heat which deepens the next thaw, in a spiraling cycle of increasing warmth.

Curbing man-made methane emissions could slow this process, said Walter Anthony.

“We have an incentive to reduce our fossil fuel emissions. By doing so, we can reduce the warming that’s occurring in the Arctic and potentially put some brakes on permafrost thaw,” she said.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in its 2010 Arctic Report Card issued last month, said the average temperature of the permafrost has been rising for decades, but noted “a significant acceleration” in the last five years at many spots on the Arctic coast.

One of those spots would be Chersky, an isolated town on the bank of the Kolyma River at the mouth of the East Siberia Sea.

The ground in this remote corner of the world, 6,600 kilometers (4,000 miles) east of Moscow, has warmed about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) in the last five years, to about -5 C (23 F?) today, says Zimov, director of the internationally funded Northeast Science Station, which is about three kilometers (2 miles) from town.

The warming is causing the landscape to buckle under his feet.

“I live here more than 30 years. … There are many (dirt) roads in our region which I used or built myself, but now I can’t use anymore. Now they look like canyons,” he says.

Buildings, too, collapse. The school in Chersky, a Soviet-era structure with a tall bronze statue of Karl Marx on its doorstep, was abandoned several years ago when the walls began to crack as the foundations gave way.

The northern Siberian soil, called yedoma, covers 1.8 million square kilometers (700,000 sq. miles) and is particularly unstable. Below the surface are vertical wedges of ice, as if 15-story-high icicles had been hammered into the soft ground, rich in decaying vegetation, over thousands of years.

As the air warms, the tops of the wedges melt and create depressions in the land. Water either forms a lake or runs off to lower ground, creating a series of steep hillocks and gullies. During summer, lakeside soil may erode and tumble into the water, settling on the bottom where bacteria eat it and cough up yet more methane.

The process takes a long time, but Zimov has done a simulation by bulldozing trees and scraping off moss and surface soil from 1 hectare (2.5 acres) of former larch forest, rendering it as if it had been leveled by fire.

Seven years later the previously flat terrain is carved up with crevices 10 to 15 feet (3 to 5 meters) deep, creating a snowy badlands.

Gazing across a white river to the apartment blocks on a distant hill, Zimov said, “In another 30 years all of Chersky will look like this.”

About the documentary: Silent Snow depicts an Inuit search for solutions to the chemical poisoning of the world. Trailer for a feature length film. Expected release: Spring 2011. Film by Jan van den Berg and Pipaluk Knudsen-Ostermann.

“There’s new evidence that even in the glaciers pesticides have been stored. If we stop the production now, there is still a lot more waiting for us. Global warming makes this process even faster… I am telling a sad story…” the narrator.

Moki Kokoris’ review, “Please watch this very important film trailer. I facilitated the screening of a 14-minute clip of “Silent Snow” at the United Nations this past spring, and will try to bring the full length feature to the UN once it’s released.”

More documentary information was published in the previous post Greenland: Silent Snow – The Project.