We don’t raise our heads when we hear that the air has cooled down completely in Siberia, which is a huge freezing room in the Northern Hemisphere. It would be surprising if that wasn’t the case. The Russian taiga-tundra regions outside the Urals make up 9 percent of the total land area on Earth and are used for comprehensive testing of all of its 39 million inhabitants. In the summer, for example, a temperature record was recorded here, with a temperature of 38 ° C in Verkhoyansk.
And now the news is more fresh than usual. At night, most places should withstand -30 and -40 degrees and the days are freezing.
It is even colder in Yakutia in eastern Siberia. The frost was measured between -55 and -50 degrees at dawn on Monday and not warmer than -50 degrees during the day. Verkhoyansk checked in again, locals woke up to -56.2 degrees on Tuesday morning, and the air had dropped to -54 degrees in the hottest hours.
In Yakutia outside the Arctic Circle, this is not breaking news: the region is the cold Arctic of the Earth, and the lowest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have been measured in two parts, Verkhoyansk and Ojmajakon. Of the two, Ujumjak is the coldest inhabited settlement on Earth, on February 6, 1933, a record temperature was measured – 67.8 ° C at the weather station located at the time. It is not a specifically agricultural area, as the soil has been frozen throughout the year. It does not melt during the short summer, although heat waves above 30 degrees are not uncommon. However, the sun “rises” for 21 hours in June, only three hours in December, and it makes it a little above the horizon, as if it does not rise.
But who lives here? How many can withstand 100 degree temperature fluctuations?
Hardly four hundred people have permanent addresses In Ojumjakon, Verkhoyansk is called their birthplace with more than a thousand. The latter can also show many centuries-old history, as the Cossacks chose the kies point of the land as their place of residence as early as 1638 and built a nearby wooden castle, and even a wooden church in 1817, which earned it the status of the administrative seat and the city.
The world of antifreeze has also been discovered in the cold pole by travel agencies. More and more tourists are curious about the pleasant exotic landscapes and experience what freezing might be like.
The air masses coming from Siberia these days will also bring us heavy frost.
Although Hungary is largely governed by westerly winds, the cyclone flow system hovering over Scandinavia is now drawing cooler air to us from the north.
It can reach 20 degrees below zero in landscapes covered with clear snow, wind and thickening at dawn. Although the number of severe days (the daily minimum temperature is less than -10 degrees) decreases with the trend of warming, extreme cold is not exceptional in January. In 1981-2010, we had an average of 4 dark days in January, two and a half days in December, we learned from Monica Lakatos, a climate expert with the National Weather Service.
As for our cold record, it’s just the average boring winter
20 degrees below zero does not appear in Yakutia. Children go to school, residents start cycling to buy fish, and many swim in the creek or one of the ponds.
For us, a few inches of snow will suffice, and trains will stop running, as happened in early January 2008, an unforgettable “snowfall” time.
At minus 35 degrees Celsius, life and school rest do not freeze. However, for us, this value is our absolute cold record so far (Miskolc-Görömbölytapolca, February 16, 1940). The largest fluctuations occurred in Baja (annual temperature fluctuation of 75.1 degrees).
However, at temperatures below 60 degrees, they even lift their heads in Yakutia. Although they are accustomed to extremes, they are also affected by the phenomenon of hypothermia, when the body tries to keep the warmth of vital internal organs at the expense of the extremities, then as the energy runs out, the body slowly cools down. Even a cold yak bull in warm clothes can withstand such a cold for up to 15 minutes in the open air.
