Press Release: Landsat 8 helps unveil the coldest place on Earth
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Scientists recently recorded the lowest temperatures on Earth at a desolate and remote ice plateau in East Antarctica, trumping a record set in 1983 and uncovering a new puzzle about the ice-covered continent.
Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and his team found temperatures from −92 to −94 degrees Celsius (−134 to −137 degrees Fahrenheit) in a 1,000-kilometer long swath on the highest section of the East Antarctic ice divide.
The measurements were made between 2003 and 2013 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on board NASA’s Aqua satellite and during the 2013 Southern Hemisphere winter by Landsat 8, a new satellite launched early this year by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.
“I’ve never been in conditions that cold and I hope I never am,” Scambos said. “I am told that every breath is painful and you have to be extremely careful not to freeze part of your throat or lungs when inhaling.”
The record temperatures are several degrees colder than the previous record of −89.2 degrees Celsius (−128.6 degrees Fahrenheit) measured on July 21, 1983 at the Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. They are far colder than the lowest recorded temperature in the United States, measured at −62 degrees Celsius (−79.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Alaska, in northern Asia at -68 degrees Celsius (−90.4 degrees Fahrenheit), or even at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet at -75 degrees Celsius (−103 degrees Fahrenheit).
Scambos said the record temperatures were found in several 5 by 10 kilometer (3 by 6 mile) pockets where the topography forms small hollows of a few meters deep (2 to 4 meters, or 6 to 13 feet). These hollows are present just off the ice ridge that runs between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji—the ice dome summits of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Antarctic bases sit on each of the sites and are generally not occupied during Antarctic winters.
Under clear winter skies in these areas, cold air forms near the snow surface. Because the cold air is denser than the air above it, it begins to move downhill. The air collects in the nearby hollows and chills still further, if conditions are favorable.
“The record-breaking conditions seem to happen when a wind pattern or an atmospheric pressure gradient tries to move the air back uphill, pushing against the air that was sliding down,” Scambos said. “This allows the air in the low hollows to remain there longer and cool even further under the clear, extremely dry sky conditions,” Scambos said. “When the cold air lingers in these pockets it reaches ultra-low temperatures.”
“Any gardener knows that clear skies and dry air in spring or winter lead to the coldest temperatures at night,” Scambos said. “The thing is, here in the United States and most of Canada, we don’t get a night that lasts three or four or six months long for things to really chill down under extended clear sky conditions.”
Centuries-old ice cracks
Scambos and his team spotted the record low temperatures while working on a related study on unusual cracks on East Antarctica’s ice surface that he suspects are several hundred years old.
“The cracks are probably thermal cracks—the temperature gets so low in winter that the upper layer of the snow actually shrinks to the point that the surface cracks in order to accommodate the cold and the reduction in volume,” Scambos said. “That led us to wonder what the temperature range was. So, we started hunting for the coldest places using data from three satellite sensors.”
More than 30 years of data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on the NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite (POES) series gave Scambos a good perspective on what the pattern of low temperatures looked like across Antarctica.
“Landsat 8 is still a new sensor, but preliminary work shows its ability to map the cold pockets in detail,” Scambos said. “It’s showing how even small hummocks stick up through the cold air.”
Scambos suspected they would find one area that got extremely cold. Instead they found a large strip at high altitude where several spots regularly reach record low temperatures. Furthermore, dozens of these extremely cold areas reached about the same minimum temperatures of −92 to −94 degrees Celsius (−134 to −137 degrees Fahrenheit) on most years.
“This is like saying that on the coldest day of the year a whole strip of land from International Falls, Minnesota to Duluth, Minnesota to Great Falls, Montana reached the exact same temperature, and more than once,” Scambos said. “And that’s a little odd.”
—Credit: Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center
The scientists suspect that a layer in the atmosphere above the ice plateau reaches a certain minimum temperature and is preventing the ice plateau’s surface from getting any colder.
A physical limit
“There seems to be a physical limit to how cold it can get in this high plateau area and how much heat can escape,” Scambos said. Although an extremely cold place, Antarctica’s surface radiates heat or energy out into space, especially when the atmosphere is dry and free of clouds.
“The levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, traces of water vapor and other gases in the air may impose a more or less uniform limit on how much heat can radiate from the surface,” Scambos said.
Scambos and his team will continue to refine their map of Earth’s coldest places using Landsat 8 data. “It’s a remarkable satellite and we’ve repeatedly been impressed with how well it works, not just for mapping temperature but for mapping crops and forests and glaciers all over the world,” Scambos said.
“The uses for Landsat 8 data are broad and diverse,” said James Irons, Landsat 8 project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “And Scambos’ work is an example of some of the intriguing science that can be done using Landsat 8.”
In the longer term, Scambos and his team will try to design weather stations and set them up in the area where the record temperatures occur to confirm the data from Landsat 8 and MODIS. Currently, most of the automated weather stations in the vicinity do not work properly in the dead of winter.
“The research bases there don’t have people that stay through the winter to make temperature measurements,” Scambos said. “We will need to investigate electronics that can survive those temperatures.”
What a fantastic way to sequester carbon dioxide. We need to build a new continent, right next to Antartica, low lying , to get the full atmospheric pressure and with lots of hollows. Shallow and cracked, we could call it Trenberthica
http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/atbd/atbd_mod11.pdf
In case people were curious if the scientist mentioned in the RT story has any credibility, no they apparently do not. Arguing that a luminance temperature measurement made under what are effectively ideal conditions for said measurements (no solar reflection to deal with, minimal water vapor, zero cloud cover) are less trustworthy than virtually any type of ground based measurements is ridiculous.
Oh, and as has been pointed out several times by myself and others, the freezing point of pure CO2 at 1,000 millibars is a lot higher than the freezing point of barely any CO2 at ~700 millibars.
On the bright side, at those temperatures, your ice cream will never melt on the way home from the store.
Yes, WUWT covered the idea of CO2 freezing in Antarctica back in 2009. It was wrong then and is wrong now.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/09/co2-condensation-in-antarctica-at-113f/
Simply put, there isn’t much CO2 in the atmosphere – it’s a trace gas – and so it won’t bash into the surface quick enough to replace those CO2 molecules that pop back into the gas phase.
Phase diagram here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/results-lab-experiment-regarding-co2-snow-in-antarctica-at-113%C2%B0f-80-5%C2%B0c-not-possible/
This story is one of the first signs of the weakness of crowd-sourced science. It needs further study from a media science perspective, not a thermodynamic viewpoint.
It strikes me that CO2 could well precipitate as CO2 frost, since the CO2 will exist in a range of kinetic energies, much the same way it forms frost on Mars. I’d love to see an experiment to test for CO2 frost.
The presence of so called greenhouse gasses will help COOL the atmosphere. This plateau is over 2000m high so will be around 19C cooler than the sea level temperature due to the DALR. Whatever, it is COLD and remember this is during the Antarctic SUMMER so it could get colder in winter.
Willis Eschenbach says:
December 9, 2013 at 11:32 pm
“I do find it odd that there would be natural CO2 “snow” and “dry ice” at the surface … what a magical world!”
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OH MY, MY, …. another “what if” associated with glacial ice core research.
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tty says:
December 10, 2013 at 1:33 am
“No. That temperature applies for pure CO2 at 1 atmosphere pressure. There is only 0.04 % CO2 in the atmosphere, so the partial pressure is only 0.0004 atmospheres (even less actually because of the altitude) so even -94 degrees is far to warm for CO2 to congeal.”
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But, … but, ….. but, …… quoting article:
“Under clear winter skies in these areas, cold air forms near the snow surface. Because the cold air is denser than the air above it, it begins to move downhill. The air collects in the nearby hollows and chills still further, if conditions are favorable.”
Just what is the % of CO2 (ppm) in the dense air that collects at the surface or in the nearby hollows?
That would be a $64 million question ….. given the fact that ice core CO2 proxy data covers the past 100K+ years.
ronald mentioned averages at 1:18 am. Is this temperature data added into the global temp sets that tell us the averages? It strikes me that a few sources or data like this could skew average temps down. But then again there are no standards for establishing average global temps as there are such as the equivalent for Weights and Measures.
If this happened in August 2010, (the record cold) why is it just being reported on now???
I guess it takes the warmists over 3 years to read a thermometer.
Considering how cold these temperatures are recorded on “Domes” of ice piled more than 4 kms high containing ice that may be more than 1 million years old near the bottom of the dome …
… there is probably little ice melt going on here.
How does this affect Steig et al.?
1. The record happened in August 2010, Antarctic winter, not summer, johnmarshall.
2. The ppm of CO2 in the hollows isn’t going to change enough that I would even hazard trying to work it out, gases just don’t work that way, Samuel C Cogar.
3. The data has been collected and archived no doubt, and it was during a more recent examination that these lows were found in the records, including the new data from the sat launched recently apparently, J Philip Peterson.
Sometimes there isn’t anyone interested enough to sit and sift through data for stuff like this, or no one free, or funding isn’t available, or any number of other reasons why it is good to have stuff archived and available, even if it isn’t immediately put to use. These satellites produce a HUGE volume of data as they map the entire surface of the planet every couple of days.
Temperatures that low could be very useful for some industrial processes – like separation of Neon, Argon, Krypton and Xenon and manufacture of bulk Liquid Nitrogen and Liquid Oxygen (needed by many industries such as steel manufacture). It also makes for highly efficient power production – good for things like aluminium smelting and steel production.
You do need to compress the air a lot but usefully there is very little water vapour to remove and much smaller amounts of energy are required for compression and cooling at -90°C (even at elevation this cold air is much denser than at 25°C sea level. Current production for these trace gases is worth several hundred million dollars per year (mostly as a byproduct of LN2 and LO2 production) and requires liquefaction of something like 50-100 cubic kilometres of air and many GW of power – so could be big savings.
Would preferably use a nice big nuclear reactor to power it.
Searching for new data is what keeps science going. It is good to see that not all science related to Climate has stagnated due to the team spiking data they do not like.
Unprecedented extreme weather. We’re doomed.
From the AP story at Drudge, “Scambos said. But he said scientists do routinely make naked 100 degree below zero dashes outside in the South Pole, so people can survive that temperature for about three minutes.” When will we try a hard vacuum, as Jim LeBlanc did in an early space-suit test?
Here we go again.
For the “CO2 snow crowd”, as others have pointed out, it’s the partial pressure of CO2 that matters.
Think in terms of water vapor and dew point. Just because it’s below freezing doesn’t mean it’s going to snow.
“The air collects in the nearby hollows and chills still further, if conditions are favorable” Favourable is not the adjective I would use to describe -90 Celsius!
As many have pointed out, there isn’t a blizzard of CO2. The coldest molecules of CO2 do stick to the surface, and they can be covered by any of a number of other cold molecules, including a few lonely, random H2O molecules. Sublimation will keep surfaces of CO2 from forming, but there will be more CO2 on the ground than in the air, just tike there’s more H2O on the ground than there is in the air. It’s just nature following the partial pressure curve.
John M says:
December 10, 2013 at 5:14 am
In addition:
And just because it is below 100°C (or 212°F), that doesn’t mean that all water in the atmosphere is condensed out as rain…
I find it interesting that they said “most of the automated weather stations in the vicinity do not work properly in the dead of winter.”
How have we measured temperatures at the poles prior to satellite data availability, and what effect could this have on global averages if included?
These temps are so incredible that you would think the msm would mention it as … well interesting news.
No mention of the snow storms and low temps in the US either.
May I humbly suggest that this spot will be chosen as the next venue for the Climate Change summit – after all it is a record setter.
The cold outside should invigorate and concentrate the mind of the delegates.
Usually they choose lovely warm places such as Durban, and maybe that is why they never achieve any agreement – the sunshine, beaches, mohitos….
Gosh, if this isn’t a sign that the man-climate ‘pocalypse is upon us, I don’t know what is!
” SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Scientists recently recorded the lowest temperatures on Earth”
This opening line from the article brought to mind the famous quote: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”, from Samuel Clemens or Jack London or whomever said it first.