Antarctica Posts Most Severe Cold Season On Record: -78 Degrees On Average

The chill is exceptional! Antarctica posts most severe cold season on record with a frigid minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius) on average

Strange Sounds

The chill was exceptional, even for the coldest location on the planet.

The average temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station between April and September, a frigid minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius), was the coldest on record, dating back to 1957. This was 4.5 degrees lower than the most recent 30-year average.

We first learned of this record through a tweet from Stefano Di Battista, who has published research on Antarctic temperatures. The legitimacy of Di Battista’s information was confirmed by Richard Cullather, a research scientist at NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.

The temperature averaged over September was also the coldest on record at South Pole, wrote David Bromwich, a polar researcher at Ohio State University, in an email.

The extreme cold over Antarctica helped push sea ice levels surrounding the continent to their fifth-highest level on record in August, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Extraordinarily cold weather continues to grip the Antarctic Plateau. Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who monitors world weather extremes, tweeted that temperature at Russia’s Vostok Station sunk to minus-110.9 degrees (minus-79.4 Celsius) on Thursday (Sept. 30), which was just one degree (0.6 Celsius) from the world’s lowest temperature on record during October.

The current temperatures are still some distance from the coldest ever observed on the continent. In 1983, Vostok plummeted to minus-129 degrees (minus-89.6 Celsius). Satellites have detected temperatures as low as minus-144 degrees (minus-98 Celsius).

Matthew Lazzara, an expert on the meteorology of Antarctica and scientist at the University of Wisconsin, monitored the South Pole temperatures in recent months from his office in Madison with awe. In an interview, he said it was around minus-100 degrees on numerous occasions. Over the years, he’s traveled to Antarctica numerous times to support his research.

“At these temperatures, it is difficult to operate aircraft,” he wrote in an email. “Between -50°C and -58°C you put the aircraft at risk with the hydraulics freezing up or fuel turning into a jelly.”

Once he visited the South Pole in late October. “I got to experience -50°C weather … with a wind chill beyond that. I was *thrilled* to be wearing my 75 lbs of Extreme Cold Weather gear to stay warm,” he joked.