Yakutsk : Coldest City In The World, 2013
Yakutsk, a remote city in Eastern Siberia along the Lena river, is the coldest city in the world. Located 1840 km away from Irkoustk and 5000 km away from Moscow, this city founded in 1632 by the Cossacks imposes upon its inhabitants an extreme way of life. Yet, despite particularly harsh conditions of life, Yakutsk counts a population of 270 000, which represents a quarter of the entire population of Siberia. No other places on the planet know such extreme changes in temperatures. In winter, the temperatures regularly fall to minus 40° (the coldest temperature recorded was -64°C) and in summer often reaches temperatures above 30°C, hence creating a world-record of thermal amplitude. Different censuses have shown that the population is regularly on the increase.
Yakutsk, is in fact an important centre for the extraction of diamonds and it supplies 20% of the world production. The city is also home to an important food industry, to tanneries, to sawmills, to building materials factories and to the Yakutsk Permafrost Institute, which investigates and aims at finding solutions to solving the serious and costly problems associated with the construction of buildings on frozen soil. Indeed, the soil of the city is constantly frozen, which on top of being an obstacle to the construction of buildings, has a serious impact on the way of life. The city is constantly engulfed in an oppressive blanket of freezing fog that restricts visibility to 10 metres. The inhabitants get to their daily routine in temperatures that only mountaineers could cope with. Here all is ice, and such conditions makes one wonder what such extremes can generates within humans.
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