Josh Voorhees, who lives in
Iowa City, Iowa, has a
Slate article about yet another place
Rico won't be going:
A little consolation for those of us who bundled up in every coat we own this week in a bid to stay warm: it could be worse. Much, much worse.
NASA announced that it has found a new coldest place on Earth (and, much to my surprise, it's not Iowa City). After analyzing more than three decades worth of satellite data, researchers found that temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times "in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau". The new all-time record low recorded was an almost unimaginable minus 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit (for the metric lovers among us, that's minus 93.2 degrees Celsius), set on 10 August 2010. (The same area came close to breaking that record again on 31 July 31 of 2013, when the temperature dropped to minus 135.3 degrees.)
As Ted Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, explained, those temperatures are about fifty degrees below anything you'd see in Alaska or Siberia, and closer to what "you'd see on Mars on a nice summer day in the poles".
The previous frosty record-holder on the books was the minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. For comparison, the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth is in northeastern Siberia, where two towns, Verkhoyansk and Oimekon, dropped to minus 90 in 1892 and 1933, respectively. More on today's announcement over at the NASA website.
Rico says global warming will
never make Antarctica a place he wants to visit...
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