Winters makes us all lazy. We start to feel the chill as the temperature starts getting close to 0 °C. But imagine living in a village where the average temperature in January is always on the negative side of zero.
The news comes from the Russian region of Yakutia where a village called Oymyakon reached a near-record low temperature of -62 °C. This temperature so enough to break the digital thermometer that was recording it. A digital thermometer was installed in the village to attract tourists. The lowest ever temperature recorded in a permanently inhabited place was in February 1933 in the same village. The temperature was - 67°C.
The village is named after Oymyakon River, whose literal meaning is ‘an unfrozen patch of water’. The Oymyakon is currently the coldest permanently inhabited village in the world. The village is so cold that even your eyelashes will freeze.
NASA had announced that it had recorded a temperature of -94.7°C through its satellite data in the freezing conditions of Antarctica in the year 2013.
The Oymyakon village witnesses sunlight only for 3 hours a day and stays in dark for the next 21 hours during winters. Despite the freezing conditions, the village has 500 permanent residents who have been living normally. In the 1920s and 1930s, this village was a halt for reindeer herders wanting to water their flocks through the thermal spring. Later, the Soviet government made it a permanent settlement site for the nomadic population.
You must toil hard to reach to this village as planes cannot land in this town during winter. If you want to drive, then it will take you at most two days to reach here from the closest major city, Yakutsk.
The residents of this village face a lot of mundane problems in their life. The residents must either park their vehicles in a heated garage or keep the engine running all day so that there is no restart issue. Batteries, glasses, pen ink and even people’s faces freeze in this village. Nothing grows on a frozen land, so the residents rely on frozen meat to fill their tummies. There is no need to store fishes in a frozen refrigerator to prevent them from decaying.
There is just one shop in the entire village and its lone school shuts if the temperature plunges below -52 °C.