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Oymyakon
A Siberian village widely cited as the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth
In Oymyakon, winter is measured in numbers most people never see on a thermometer. This village of a few hundred people in Russia's Sakha Republic is widely cited as the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with a recorded low of −67.7 °C in February 1933. January days average around −46 °C. Cars are kept in heated garages or left running, the frozen ground has to be thawed with fires before a grave can be dug, and residents dress in layers of fur and wool. Yet summers can be surprisingly warm, occasionally passing 30 °C, which gives Oymyakon one of the widest temperature ranges of any inhabited place.
Oymyakon stands at about 745 meters above sea level in the Yana–Oymyakon Highlands of northeastern Siberia, on the Indigirka River, roughly 30 kilometers from the neighboring village of Tomtor. It lies along the Kolyma Highway, the road from Yakutsk to Magadan built largely by Gulag prisoners and known as the Road of Bones. Its cold comes from geography: the village sits in a basin ringed by mountains, far from any ocean, where dense, frigid air pools on still winter nights beneath a strong high-pressure system. The ground is permafrost. Most residents are Sakha (Yakuts), many of them raising cattle and the hardy, shaggy Yakutian horses that are part of local life.
Oymyakon grew from a stopover where herders watered their animals, and its name is usually said to mean "unfrozen water," for a nearby spring, though the derivation is debated. Its record of −67.7 °C, set on February 6, 1933, is matched almost exactly by Verkhoyansk, about 630 kilometers to the northwest, which logged −67.8 °C in 1892, and both towns claim the title Pole of Cold. An unofficial figure of −71.2 °C from 1924 appears on a local monument but is not accepted. The World Meteorological Organization lists a colder Northern Hemisphere reading, −69.6 °C at an uninhabited weather station on the Greenland ice sheet in 1991. Winter tourism now brings visitors seeking the cold, while warming summers raise concerns about thawing permafrost.