Vostok Station

The Russian research base Vostok in Antarctica logged −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F) on 21 July 1983. No weather station has recorded anything colder.

Satellites have sensed ground-surface readings near −98 °C, but those are not accepted as air-temperature records.

Context

Vostok Station sits on the high East Antarctic ice sheet at an elevation of about 3,500 m. The combination of high altitude, extreme dryness, long polar night and a lack of heat from the sea makes it among the coldest places on the planet. The record reading of -89.2 degrees Celsius was taken on 21 July 1983 in the middle of the Antarctic winter.

The reading is accepted as the lowest official surface air temperature because it was made by a standard thermometer at a manned weather station. Satellites have since measured lower values, down to about -98 degrees Celsius in small hollows of the East Antarctic plateau, but these are readings of the snow surface rather than air temperature taken at standard height, so the World Meteorological Organization does not count them.

Vostok is also well known for the ice cores drilled there, which stretch back hundreds of thousands of years and have given scientists a record of past climate and atmospheric gases. Beneath the station lies Lake Vostok, a large body of liquid water sealed under about 4 km of ice.