The final post about the January trip of my friend Vitalik. This is how it happens, at first he didn’t want to write, but then he signed for several posts :) I read and understand that these are the people who need to write blogs, he writes too well. But this is not surprising, they are all linguists.
During my two days at the Pole of Cold, I learned something remarkable from the life of ordinary Oymyakonians. As a result, the idea arose to present this in the form of a small selection of 33 facts. This is what ended up happening.
1. Oymyakon in Yakutia is the name for an entire region, which includes several settlements, including a village of the same name. The center of the region is the village of Tomtor, where there is an airport and a weather station where the minimum temperature was recorded at -71.2°C. Here you can have a look.
2. In Oymyakon itself (the village), which is located 40 km north of Tomtor, there has never been a weather station, but for the sake of decency, a memorial stele was installed there too.
3. Externally, the villages of the Oymyakon Valley differ little from those we are used to somewhere in the Volga region. It turns out that the technology of a simple Russian hut can easily withstand extreme frosts.
4. Cars really do drive with double windows. Moreover, if a double glass is placed on the windshield at once, then this is impossible with the side ones, so the second glass is glued to ordinary tape. Otherwise, the person sitting next to you will risk frostbite on half of his face.
5. Cars are turned off at night, but there are special heated garages for them, where the temperature does not drop much below zero, so starting is not a problem.
6. At temperatures below minus 56 (this is considered cold here), equipment begins to behave strangely, and it is not recommended to travel far unless absolutely necessary.
7. If you still had to drive in such frost, then your gasoline consumption doubles. In addition, if you stop along the way, the tires begin to deform under the weight of the car, and at first you have to drive slowly and as if over bumps. You also have to carry with you a full set of spare parts, enough to repair an engine that stalls on the road.
8. Primary school children stop going to school at temperatures below -52, older children at minus 58. This is due to the same risk of equipment failure, because many children get to school by bus.
9. Some houses, for example, in the village of Kuidusun, where I stayed, have a central water supply. However, only hot water flows from the tap (cold water would simply freeze in the pipes), and taking a shower for those whose hot water has been turned off at home should be funny: you need to carry cold water in buckets and dilute it with hot water from the tap - the opposite is true.
10. By the way, many people have a toilet in the yard. It has light, but no heating, and this is considered the norm. I probably won’t share my feelings from visiting such a place here =) However, they are trying to build new houses in a familiar, non-extreme format.
11. The cost of firewood for heating 120 m2 of a house + bathhouse + garage for a season (which lasts here 8 months) is about 50 thousand rubles. Taking into account the fact that this also provides hot water, it turns out even cheaper than in Moscow.
12. “Oymyakon” translated from Even means “non-freezing water”. Indeed, where else can she not freeze? It's all about the warm springs that come out of the ground and form streams on the surface. They freeze completely only by March. The nature around them is exceptionally beautiful.
13. People live by hunting (for themselves) and raising livestock (for sale and cash). Horses are bred for meat; there is also a large reindeer farm. The photo shows a cowshed.
14. The Yakut horse is a unique animal. She does not need a barn, she grazes in the open air in any weather, she also gets her own food by picking the frozen ground with her hoof. It should be fed only so that it does not go far from its owners.
15. Farmers say that this horse is “programmed” to search for special nutritious herbs, so its meat contains such a complex of vitamins that allows a person to eat fully without eating vegetables and fruits.
16. Horse meat is considered rough meat by the locals. Foal meat is held in high esteem, and in a Yakut restaurant you will be served it, not horse meat.
17. A foal is slaughtered at the age of 6-7 months by blindfolding it and delivering a targeted blow with a hammer.
18. I can’t check the vitamins, but a bottle of kumis made from this horse’s milk makes you forget about hunger for a long time. Its taste is exceptionally tart and reminiscent of a thick, strong ale.
19. The height of the hunting season occurs during the most severe frost, because... In the spring, hunting is prohibited - during this season the animals give birth, and in the summer the competition comes from bears (which, however, does not really stop the locals, they only complain that it is forbidden to shoot bears, and if necessary, it will then have to be proven).
20. Despite their attachment to nature, locals are very knowledgeable in information technology (though only MTS has mobile Internet). For example, the driver Max, who was driving me from Ust-Nera to Tomtor, quit his job with his wife, they are now engaged in network marketing - they manage the sales of some Tibetan dietary supplements.
21. Everyone, including 70-year-old pensioners, has a WhatsApp account with photos.
22. WhatsApp allows you to help out a driver or hunter in case of problems: for example, if he did not return at the agreed time and did not get in touch, the wife makes an alert through the group, and everyone who is in touch helps organize a search and rescue operation.
23. A debt in a store can be paid by transferring from card to card.
24. In the village of Tomtor there is a cafe throughout the entire area (at least they go there with family and friends, like in a cafe). You can't eat foal meat there, but you can have French fries and nuggets - these are a delicacy for the locals. Having learned that I was from Moscow, they persistently tried to find out whether they got the right potatoes.
25. Of the law enforcement agencies in the entire Oymyakon Valley, only Tomtor has a district police officer and an investigator. In other villages, according to locals, anarchy, banditry and drunken fights reign.
26. There is one guy in Oymyakon, I don’t remember his name. One day, in a drunken brawl, he was knocked out right on the street and abandoned. He woke up 15 minutes later, came home, and fell asleep. The result was amputation of almost all frostbitten fingers. By the way, he works as a driver now.
27. There is a local history museum in Tomtor. In it you can twirl almost all the exhibits in your hands, including a carbine from 1764. Visiting the museum is free, but to do this you must first find its owner. .
28. Oymyakonye is famous for its Gulag camps, of which there were 29 in one area. They say that in order to counter escapes, the NKVD officers promised local hunters for each hand of a fugitive they brought a bag of sugar or flour (the brush was needed to verify fingerprints). The scheme worked. Moreover, the especially cunning ones first caught the fugitives, forced them to work for themselves for a while, and only then killed them: so what, a bag of sugar is not superfluous.
29. In addition to local history, there is a Gulag museum, as the locals call it. It was assembled by a simple rural teacher and located in the school building. I wrote a little more about it
Oymyakon is the famous pole of cold. It is considered the coldest point in the Northern Hemisphere and the coldest populated area on Earth.
Translated from Yakut, Oymyakon means “mad cold.”
Oymyakon in Yakutia is the name given to an entire region that includes several settlements, including a village of the same name. Currently, just over 500 people live in the village of Oymyakon. Despite its remoteness, there is life in the city, but living in such conditions is not easy and people are slowly leaving in all directions...
Life at the Pole of Cold.
Temperature
The officially recorded minimum temperature is -69.6 °C, but there are other, non-official data. So, in 1938 the temperature was -77.8 degrees, but these values were not included in the official chronicles.
In summer, the temperature stays around 10-15 degrees, but even here there are records. On July 28, 2010, a heat record was recorded in the village of Oymyakon - the air warmed up to +34.6 °C.
From 213 to 229 days a year there is snow in Oymyakon. The temperature difference between summer and winter reaches 104 °C— according to this indicator, Oymyakon ranks one of the first places in the world!
Living in cold conditions
Civilization in Oymyakon: there is the Internet, and cellular communications, and an airport, which was created during the Second World War. There is a school, hospital, club, kindergarten, music school, library, bakery, gas station, gym and shops.
The average salary here is certainly not small, higher even than the Moscow average, but prices are 5-10 times higher than in other regions, and life in Oymyakon is a real test.
Work for "fresh air".
Main fear– problems with energy, because if there is no energy for at least a week, then the entire infrastructure in the village will simply freeze and will have to be replaced.
The cars are parked in heated garages, and the engine is warmed up for 10–15 minutes before leaving. If there is no garage, then the engine is not turned off, but, as they say in Yakutia, it is turned on. Additional stoves are installed in the vehicle cabins, and arctic diesel fuel is used (diesel fuel is mixed with kerosene).
Yakut truck drivers do not turn off their engines for months.
Gas station on the road to Oymyakon.
In Oymyakon, the most ordinary objects and things take on very unusual forms. For example, the police here never carry batons - in the cold they harden and burst upon impact, like glass. Fish removed from water in the cold becomes glassy in five minutes. You also have to dry your laundry very carefully. In a couple of minutes in the cold it becomes a stake, and after two hours the things need to be brought back. If you do this carelessly, the pillowcase or duvet cover may break in half.
There is a special attitude towards clothes: beautiful or ugly - it doesn’t matter, the main thing is that it is warm. A real Oymyakonian wears high boots made from kamus, the skin of the lower part of a reindeer's leg. The length of the fur coat must reach oz. Otherwise, you can freeze your knees and shins. On the head is a fur hat made of arctic fox, mink or fox. You can't go outside without a scarf. In severe frost, you can only breathe outside through a scarf. Thus, at least some amount of warm air enters the lungs.
A woman sells a live hare and frozen fish at the market.
Children
Children in Oymyakon are not like those on the mainland. From an early age they are ready for frosts and harsh Yakut weather. When it’s completely cold outside, no heating helps.
Small children are dressed like cabbages, leaving only their eyes open; they can only walk on a sled, since the baby is unlikely to be able to walk independently in such uniforms.
Schoolchildren sit in class in coats and warm up with gel pens, which, in theory, do not freeze in the cold...
Primary school education is canceled at -52°C, and at -56°C the entire school is closed.
Animals
Despite the fact that the temperature here is extremely low, people first settled here precisely because they found food for livestock here. They graze here mainly small tundra horses, which even in winter can easily find food for themselves by digging out grass from under the snow.
A cow can be released from a warm barn only at -30 °C, putting a special bra on the udder so that it does not freeze. Previously, in these parts there were “burenki” of the Yakut breed, whose udders were covered with hair, and they did not suffer so much from the cold. But this breed has practically disappeared - in Soviet times they stopped breeding it due to low milk yields.
Also, near Oymyakon, there used to be a large livestock-breeding state farm and a farm where silver fox were bred. Her fur was the best. It’s probably not in vain that they say that the stronger the frost, the better the fur. Now both the complex and the farm are closed.
Of all the domestic animals, only dogs, horses and, of course, reindeer can endure winter outside... There are also cats here. True, cats are not allowed out of the house in the cold, because... they will freeze immediately.
Living creatures.
Nature and sights
Oymyakon has beautiful, unique nature: there are streams that do not freeze in 50-degree frost, and ice fields that do not melt in 30-degree heat.
Natural landscapes of Oymyakon.
Recently, tourism has been very developed. Foreigners and Russian travelers come from all over the country.
Among the local attractions- museums, Gulag camps, Moltan Rock and Lake Labynkyr full of secrets and legends and, of course, the bitter frost itself.
Held annually in spring Festival "Oymyakon - Pole of Cold", which brings together Santa Clauses from all over the world.
How to get there
Despite its location, regular excursions and tours are held here and this is the only way to get to this region. It’s better not to risk it yourself, it’s too dangerous, unless in the summer you can try to go under your own power. A trip to Oymyakon in winter can easily be compared to a flight to Mars.
- January 20, 2016
Incredible facts
Welcome to Oymyakon - the coldest village on Earth, where the average temperature in January is -50 C, and the eyelashes of local residents freeze as soon as they step outside.
Oymyakon is best known as one of the “Poles of Cold” on Earth.
If we take into account some parameters, we can say that the Oymyakon Valley is the most severe settlement on Earth.
Temperature in Oymyakon
Winter 2017-2018 turned out to be so severe that the new electronic thermometer broke as soon as it registered 62 degrees Celsius.
The official weather station at the cold pole recorded -59 degrees, but local residents say their thermometers showed the temperature dropped to -67 C, which is 1 degree above the permissible temperature for a place with a permanent population.
A digital thermometer in Oymyakon was installed in 2017 to help attract tourists, but record low temperatures caused it to fail.
Oymyakon on the map
1. Today the village is home to about 500 people. In the 1920s and 1930s, reindeer herders stopped here so their herds could drink from the thermal spring. This is where the name of the village comes from, which translates as “water that does not freeze.”
2. In 1933, a temperature of -67.7 C was recorded, which is still the coldest temperature in the northern hemisphere. Temperatures dropped lower only in Antarctica, but there is no permanent population there.
3. Daily problems faced by local residents include pen paste freezing, glasses freezing and then sticking to the face, and batteries draining quickly.
4. They say that local residents do not even turn off their cars, since it will be impossible to bring them in. Truckers even work for several months without turning off the engine. However, sometimes even this does not help, since after a 4-hour parking the car simply freezes and its wheels turn to stone.
5. The average life expectancy in this village is 55 years, and what residents fear most is funerals. The fact is that it is very difficult to bury the dead due to the fact that the earth is hard as stone. To soften it, a fire is first lit, after which the hot coals are pushed aside and a small hole is dug. This process is repeated for several days until the hole is deep enough for the coffin.
6. To get to Oymyakon from Moscow, you need to fly for 6 hours to Yakutsk, then drive another 1,000 km along a snow-covered highway. But in the summer you can try to fly to the village by plane, but you will have to land at your own risk, since the airport is old, there is an abandoned kindergarten nearby, and all this is surrounded by a large unplowed field on which planes land.
Oymyakon – pole of cold
7. Children here are wrapped up so that they are unable to move independently. Here is one example:
* First, they put on warm underwear and woolen pants on top, after which they put on thicker cotton pants.
*Knitted socks and felt boots must be worn on your feet.
* After this, the child is wrapped in a tsigey fur coat, first one hat is put on his head, and on top of that is another tsigey hat.
* Rabbit mittens are put on the child’s hands, and a scarf is tied very tightly around his face so that only his eyebrows and eyes remain visible.
* They put a fur coat on the stove, which is then laid on a sleigh, the child is carried out in their arms, put on a sleigh and taken to the kindergarten.
8. In winter it is very dreary here, since the day lasts only 4 hours, but people still stay in their houses and warm themselves by the stove.
9.
You can go to school until the temperature drops to −60 degrees. At the same time, schoolchildren sit in their coats, and together they warm the pens with their breath so that they can write with them.
10. All the clothes of local residents are made from natural fur, since everything artificial simply breaks down in the cold. High boots, which are made from the skin of the lower part of a deer's leg, are worn on the legs. It is better that the fur coat reaches the shoes, since if it is shorter, you can seriously freeze your shins and knees. Only a hat made of mink, arctic fox or fox is put on the head.
Oymyakon, Russia
11. The most favorite holiday of all local residents is the holiday of the North. Especially on this day, three very important and long-awaited guests come to Oymyakon - Grandfather Frost from Veliky Ustyug, Santa Claus straight from Lapland, as well as the Yakut Grandfather Frost Chiskhan, who is considered the keeper of the cold.
12. All foreigners are shocked by what they see. Many people don’t know what felt boots are, and to help them, locals hang “right” and “left” signs on each felt boot.
13. Women here, like all women in the world, want to look good. Therefore, even at a temperature of -60 C, some people wear stockings, high heels and a short skirt. In this case, of course, they put on a very long fur coat on top.
14. Residents do not need refrigerators, since local residents simply keep fresh-frozen fish, butter, meat and berries on the veranda of their house.
15. All village residents are aware of the rules for living in very low temperatures. One of them says that a person is able to withstand low temperatures if he is not afraid of them, or rather, not afraid of freezing. According to scientists, a panicky fear of freezing speeds up the freezing process, and if a person has given himself a clear instruction “I’m not cold!”, then such a psychological technique significantly increases the period of survival in the cold.
Dear readers!
Before reading the text, on behalf of the site administration, I would like to say a few words about this material. We were approached by the real hero of this story - Oleg Sukhomesov, who lived in the extreme conditions of the Russian north, and based on whose story, as it turned out later, this essay was prepared. You can read Oleg Sukhomesov’s first-hand interview with a Moskovsky Komsomolets correspondent here.
Since our resource is free, we cannot reliably track whether the author of the material has real experience of living in Oymyakon. Nikolai Fateev, unfortunately, no longer answers our questions.
We leave this material on the site, since it has received a sufficient number of positive reviews from readers and everything has sufficient information value. Comments on the article are disabled due to the absence of the hero of the occasion.
About Me…
Hello! My name is Nikolai, I am 38 years old and I want to tell you my story. It just so happened that my mother gave birth to me at the cold pole. Probably, dear readers, you are knowledgeable enough to know that the pole of cold does not coincide with either the north pole or the south pole, but is located in, in the village of Oymyakon. In fact, residents of neighboring Verkhoyansk vigorously argue that it is colder here, but it has been documented that it is colder in Oymyakon, even if this is not the case, everyone still believes.
My parents, being naive students, came here in the late 60s from Novosibirsk, assigned after college. I don’t know what motivated them, this topic was never raised in the family, but it just so happened that my sister and I were born here. After school, Svetlana went to study in Vladivostok, got married there and stayed by the warm Sea of Japan for the rest of her life (for us, Vladivostok is a very warm city). I trained as an electrician in Yakutsk and returned to my native village. From Yakutsk to Oymyakon is about a thousand kilometers. There is no bus service all year round. In the summer you can still get there by public transport, but in the winter you have to take a UAZ “loaf” and drive it through the snowy desert. The journey takes on average thirty hours, so only a wealthy person can afford to travel or come to Oymyakon in winter. It's not winter here only from the second half of May to the first half of September. The rest of the time it’s dog cold.
It’s funny to read the news or watch stories on television where they tell how Moscow is frozen at twenty degrees below zero; our children stop going to school only when the thermometer drops below sixty degrees. Twenty degrees with a minus sign is a fabulous warmth, minus thirty is a slight coolness. In January in Oymyakon the average temperature is 55 degrees below zero, in February it is even colder, below sixty. People endure such weather gifts with steadfastness. Even in summer there are periodically negative temperatures, there is no need to talk about any tanning in such a climate, you just need to survive.
My parents worked at a weather station. In theory, they could have retired after fifteen years of work, but they worked for twenty-two years - and then left for the mainland, where they were seriously ill for several years. In Oymyakon, due to the high ambient temperature, there are no viruses at all; they simply die here. On the mainland, any cold, any flu, can be fatal for a northerner. Now, following my Parents, I went south to Novosibirsk. So far I’ve only been living here for a year, but first things first. Let's start with what kind of village Oymyakon is.
Oymyakon village
It is unclear who needs Oymyakon. The authorities have long stopped paying attention to the problems of poor northerners. Before moving to I worked as an electrician at the Airport. Electrician is a big word. At the extreme cold, it looks like an old barn-like building, with broken windows, torn doors and furniture collected from neighbors who abandoned their homes. Nobody funds the airport, so all its personnel - the dispatcher, the runway inspector, the electrician - survive as best they can. They paid us a salary, but they didn’t give us any money for repairs and other needs. After I quit, the inspector began to combine his work with the work of an electrician. There was nothing tricky in my work - I just had to organize the illumination of the runway. In the cold, the light bulbs exploded, even while under a hood. Of course, there are special lamps that are not afraid of frost, but no one allocated us money for them. You can, of course, not fly at night, but in winter we only have four hours of light, of which two hours are twilight. Like it or not, you have to turn on the lights on the strip. If nothing changes, the dispatcher will soon leave the airport, and then the inspector will probably have to combine three positions.
In a dilapidated log building, which we call the airport, there is a waiting room. It looks like a room with two old sofas. It is very cold there, because the airport is old and it blows quietly from the cracks.
Near the airport there is a cow pen and a kindergarten. Now it only works halfway; there are still children in Oymyakon. A little further away there is a huge field that even a very drunk person cannot call level; this is our runway.
The airport was organized during the Great Patriotic War. There was an air base here for the Pacific Fleet, which carried out raids on Japan. After the end of the Second World War, the airport began to be used for peaceful purposes, for civilians. Only two aircraft models flew here - An-2 and An-24. Flights are prohibited at temperatures of minus six degrees Celsius and below. In Soviet times, planes flew all year round, then, during perestroika, flights were stopped, which almost killed the village, but a few years later they resumed again. True, now there is communication with Yakutsk only in the summer. Previously, there was also a flight to the village of Ust-Nera, but it was now closed as unnecessary. In winter, you can only get to the big city by UAZ.
In our cold weather, the car is not turned off. Truckers in Yakutia have their engines running for months at a time without turning them off. In two hours of inactivity, everything will freeze so much that then you will have to wait until summer to start. On the mainland, cars are heated in warm boxes and car washes. We don’t have anything like that in Oymyakon. And in general, in all of Yakutia, probably only in Yakutsk you can find warm boxes. If you leave a car with the engine running for four hours, it will also freeze and the wheels will turn to stones. Of course, you can drive such a car, but very carefully and slowly. Imagine riding on wheels that resemble the shape of an egg - is it comfortable? And we had to travel like this every winter. You slowly drift away and think: “Damn this north, I’ll go to Sochi and buy a house.” And then you don’t go anywhere. And not because you love this Oymyakon and these frosts so much, it’s just that everything starts spinning again, starts spinning and there’s no time for it anymore. You have to survive here.
It is not uncommon for tires to burst in winter. Iron car frames regularly crack, plastic bumpers crumble into dust due to frost. The most cruel thing that can happen to a car enthusiast is if the heater in his car breaks down. Of course, they glue everything here, both the doors and the windows, but the cold still enters the car, and the car itself cools down due to the outside air. If the stove is covered, put on everything you find and how you want, drag it to the nearest village. True, they are not the same here as in the central part of Russia, and you can drive two or three hundred kilometers before you find someone, or even five hundred.
People on the mainland are afraid that the dollar will rise, the ruble will fall, tariffs will be raised, etc. and so on. in Oymyakon, the main fear is problems with energy. In conditions of such frost, you begin to treat the ordinary joys of life with particular reverence. The entire village is heated by a diesel power plant. There is no need to talk about any boiler room in such frost; the losses will be too great. In my lifetime, our diesel power plant has failed several times in the bitterest cold. Moreover, to my memory, no one has ever done a major overhaul of the power plant. Fortunately, Yakutsk promptly responded to the breakdown and sent a team of workers. Nevertheless, the male population, at this time, tried to prevent the water pipe from freezing, which would then burst, after the power plant was repaired. Everyone who could took a blowtorch and warmed the pipes.
Each house here has its own heating element, since transferring hot water in sixty-degree frost is fraught - at best, it will simply cool down. But in order for at least the cold to reach a person, the pipes have to be heated with electricity. To do this, special heating cables are placed on them, and a casing is placed on top. If the power plant stops working, the pipes stop heating, and the casing is only able to hold heat for a certain time - then it becomes insufficient. You have to rip off the casing and heat the pipe with a blowtorch. If a pipe breaks, it is impossible to replace it before summer. Can you imagine leaving a hospital, school or kindergarten without water?
Yes, at the Cold Pole there is a hospital, a school, and a store. Work is found not only for tough men, but also for fragile women. Even children in Oymyakon are not the same as on the mainland. From an early age she is ready for frost and harsh Yakut weather. When it’s completely cold outside, no heating helps. Schoolchildren sit in class in coats (the coat is specially kept at school, because there is no reason to carry it with you back and forth) and warm up with gel pens, which, in theory, do not freeze in the cold.
The attitude towards clothing in Oymyakon is not at all the same as on the mainland. Beautiful or ugly – it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that it is warm. If you run out into the street for a couple of minutes in a thin jacket, the sleeve or collar may break off. A real Oymyakonian wears high boots made from kamus, the skin of the lower part of a reindeer's leg. For one pair of high boots you need ten kamus, that is, fur from ten deer legs. The length of the fur coat must reach oz. Otherwise, you can freeze your knees and shins. On the head is a fur hat made of arctic fox, mink or fox, for those who live more modestly. You can't go outside without a scarf. In severe frost, you can only breathe outside through a scarf. Thus, at least some amount of warm air enters the lungs. At low temperatures, the oxygen content in the air is very low, so the average person's breathing rate doubles. If you exhale in the cold in silence, you can hear a rustling sound; this is the exhaled air freezing. The Oymyakon frosts are not dangerous for colds, but frostbite here is easier to get - you can also protect yourself from it only with a warm scarf.
The nature of women does not change either at plus twenty or at minus sixty. Even in this weather in Oymyakon you can meet a woman in stockings and a short skirt, although on top there will be a long, very long fur coat, but that doesn’t change the essence of the matter. It is enough to announce dances - and beauties will come from all the nearby villages to show themselves and look at others. There are also women in Yakut villages.
Children of the Pole of Cold
It so happened that I don’t have my own children. There was a wife, but God did not send children. I read somewhere that children choose their own parents; apparently none of them wanted to live at the Cold Pole. Smart guys, nothing to say. No matter how hard it is for adults in Oymyakon, it is doubly hard for children. When I was just a baby, before being taken out into the street, they would dress me for half an hour, and all this was very reminiscent of a mysterious ritual. First, they put on warm underwear, then woolen trousers, and on top - a cotton overall. On the body - a flannel shirt, on top - a warm sweater. And then, to complete the image of cabbage, a hen fur coat. On the feet - ordinary socks, woolen socks and felt boots. On the head there is a knitted hat, and on top there is a knitted hat. On the palm are bunny mittens. It was absolutely impossible to walk around in such a knightly costume. Therefore, small children here are not driven along the street, but are carried in sleds. You can’t just put a child in a sled - you need to heat the bedding on the stove, lay it down first, and sit the child on top. On the outside, only the baby’s eyes and eyebrows remain; the rest of the body is not cold.
You're from the north, why are all the walruses there?
Are you a singer or what? Come on, sing! Are you from the north? Can you walk without a hat in winter? When I first moved to Novosibirsk and told me that I grew up on Oymyakon, everyone was very surprised. They thought that we could walk barefoot in the snow in -50 degree frost. On the contrary, the further north a person lives, the more careful he is about heat and, accordingly, dresses warmer.
Until recently, no one went winter swimming in Yakutia. Nowadays there are also few amateurs, but even accidents do not scare them away. For example, there is a bad tradition in Russia - to dive into an ice hole for baptism. It’s surprising that the Orthodox Church insists that this ritual is not a church ritual and in general is harmful, but every year the people dive more and more into the ice hole. This fashion for false Orthodoxy also reached Yakutia in the mid-2000s. It cost several dozen people their health, and for some, probably, their lives. Imagine for yourself, outside the window it’s minus fifty-five degrees, the water temperature is three degrees above zero. You undress - you walk dry through the snow to the water - no problems, you take a plunge - it’s generally great, warm, but as soon as you get out, your feet instantly freeze to the ice. I myself witnessed how the first desperate daredevils dived into the ice hole. We then tore them off the ice with force. The Russian man is good at doing bad things. No one finished their experiments with winter swimming at the cold pole - they began to dive, but with a bucket of hot water at hand. A man gets out of the water and a hot sheet is poured in front of him so that he has time to run to the car, dry himself and put on dry clothes. Another way is to dive in shoes, the shoes do not stick to the ice. Diving into an ice hole while intoxicated is strictly prohibited.
In general, if you have been drinking, it is better not to go out. Alcohol doesn't protect you from the cold. He is more of an enemy than a friend. Falling and falling asleep is not difficult. In the best case scenario, frozen limbs are amputated. Although can such a case be called the best? Alcohol causes a lot of trouble in the north. Previously, there was prohibition in Oymyakon. Nobody introduced it, it just was there, and people followed it. The instinct of self-preservation told them that it was better not to keep even half a liter in the house out of harm's way. If you want to drink, drink a little at home. Now you can read, now about the bottom frozen to death, then about something else. Vodka generally freezes in the cold, like mercury thermometers, which do not work below forty-five degrees below zero. In the village, residents use alcohol thermometers, but rather not for any benefit, but rather for fun. It’s clear that it’s cold outside the window, but what difference does it make – fifty degrees or fifty-five?
In Oymyakon, the most ordinary objects and things take on very unusual forms. For example, the police here never carry batons - in the cold they harden and burst upon impact, like glass. Fish removed from water in the cold becomes glassy in five minutes. You also have to dry your laundry very carefully. In a couple of minutes in the cold it becomes a stake, and after two hours the things need to be brought back. If you do this carelessly, the pillowcase or duvet cover may break in half.
Of all the domestic animals, only dogs, horses and, of course, reindeer can endure winter outside. Cows spend most of the year in warm bread. They can be released outside only when the thermometer rises above thirty degrees below zero, but even at this temperature it is necessary to wear a special bra on the udder, otherwise the animal will freeze it. Nobody uses refrigerators here most of the year, storing meat, fish and lingonberries on the veranda. You cannot chop meat with an ax - otherwise it will turn into small splinters, you have to saw it. Local residents suffer from vitamin deficiency. They try to fight it with onions, but it provides only a small amount of vitamins.
People at the Cold Pole look much older than their years, and only a few live more than fifty-five years. It is worth mentioning separately about funerals in our climate. There is even a saying here - God forbid you die in winter. They dig the graves for a whole week. The earth is first heated with a stove, then the soil is dug about twenty centimeters with crowbars, then it is heated again and dug again, and so on until the depth reaches two meters. The work is terrible. There are no full-time diggers in Oymyakon; grave digging falls entirely on the shoulders of relatives and friends.
Oymyakon now
Now there is still work to be done at the Cold Pole. It will always be here as long as there are people, but every year there are fewer and fewer residents. Someone dies, someone leaves for the mainland. Previously, near Oymyakon there was a large livestock-breeding state farm and a farm where silver fox were bred. Her fur was the best. It’s probably not in vain that they say that the stronger the frost, the better the fur. Now both the complex and the farm are closed. A small number of people work at the airport, some work at the substation, and the meteorological station is still functioning. People from the mainland do not come to work here, except for very desperate brave men, but such people over the past ten years can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Salaries by northern standards are not the highest, but when I say in Novosibirsk that I received 72 thousand rubles in Oymyakon, everyone rolls their eyes dreamily. They simply don’t know that chocolate there costs seven hundred rubles per bar, and all other goods are also very expensive.
Away from the cold
After the divorce from my wife and the death of my parents, I began to feel truly depressed. Although my parents lived far away, once a year I regularly went out to see them, looked at the huge Novosibirsk and envied all the people living there. None of you understands how difficult it is to eke out your existence in conditions of inhuman cold. By the age of thirty-five, my body probably had the biological age of a fifty-year-old man. There are practically no teeth left at all. At thirty-seven it would have been fifteen years since I worked in Oymyakon, which means I was entitled to a pension. After retirement, I didn’t work a single day. I waited for the first UAZ to go to Yakutsk, collected things dear to my memory and drove away. I said goodbye to several people, walked around my native village for the last time and that’s it.
Then there was paperwork with an extract from Oymyakon, a flight to Novosibirsk, the passport office, justice, etc. and so on. My parents left me a two-room apartment in the city on Serebryannikovskaya Street, so I live almost in the center. I don’t know any problems, every new day is really new for me. I had a computer for a long time, but it was only in Novosibirsk that I discovered the Internet. At first I felt awkward in the supermarket and in the subway, and the crowds of people on the streets were embarrassing. Living in the north, you spend a huge amount of time with yourself or with your loved ones. Thus, even the most sociable person runs the risk of becoming an introvert. I still find it difficult to start a conversation with a stranger. Even though I served in the army and lived in Yakutsk while I was studying at a technical school, I was still not used to huge masses of people. And yet, here on the mainland, people are much more sociable than here in the North. Recently I found all my friends in my classmates who had left Oymyakon before - no one is sad or wants to go back.
The only thing I sometimes dream about is our warm stove. Where I, when I was just a little kid, slept on long winter nights. I slept on the stove, and my mother got up very early and cooked food for us in this stove. This dream is so real that immediately after it I wake up and for a long time I cannot understand where I am, and then I go to the window and look at the large beautiful houses, sometimes I see people walking down the street and not wrapping themselves in a scarf and I understand that I am in a completely different, warm world. I have heard more than once that Novosibirsk is considered a cold city. It depends on what you compare it to.
There is great infrastructure here. You can leave or fly anywhere. Thousands of northerners, who find themselves in harsh natural conditions not of their own free will, but because they were born there, dream of living in Novosibirsk or a similar large and warm city, where water runs from the tap all the time, and does not freeze for months, where there is no need to be afraid, that the car will stall and you will freeze to death. By the way, I recently bought myself a car – Renault Logan. It started for me without autostart in the winter, in thirty-degree frost, when the neighbors' cars were parked. My new friend Shurik jokes that the engine understands that I am a northerner and cannot act so foolishly in front of me, which is why it starts up like a clock.
Life at forty is just beginning...
I was brought up in such a way that I always believed that after forty, the sunset had already begun. I look at Siberians now, at the age of forty they hang out with young girls, look smart and generally don’t consider themselves old. This is still new to me. When I asked a colleague at my new job: “How old do you think I am?” She immediately replied: “Fifty?” On the one hand it was funny, but on the other it was awkward. I’m only thirty-eight, which means I can start a new life and even have children. So far, however, not everything is smooth on this ground.
I work as an electrician at a supply base. Not the most romantic profession, give women bosses or narrow specialists with a large salary, but I have neither position nor salary, and I also have health problems. As soon as some kind of epidemic begins in the city, I immediately begin to get sick. There is no immunity to illnesses from the mainland, but during the one winter that I lived here, I never got frostbite. The mild Siberian frost does not leave any marks on my skin. What will happen to me, an ordinary Oymyakon man, next is unknown, but I am sure that nothing bad will happen. The past is forgotten, the future is closed, the present is given.
Instead of an afterword
I hope that someday the authorities will look away from their PR, their money and their dirt and pay attention to the problems of ordinary people. There are a lot of us. We are probably not brilliant, that we cannot find a place for ourselves in the sun, but we are also people and we also deserve small, but happiness. If somewhere in a remote village in Yakutia a child begins to get sick in winter and the paramedic throws up his hands, then nothing can be done to help the child. There are no roads, no communications, no chance. Diamonds are mined in our region, we bring a lot of money to the treasury, where does it all go? Why do we need such small villages where it is impossible to live? Let Vladimir Putin not save Siberian Cranes or dive for amphorae, but come to Yakutia and see how people live there. I don’t want to seem like a whiner, but with this attitude of the authorities towards the Russian north, we will soon completely lose control over this territory. There will be one big white desert. Better give Yakutia to the Japanese, stop indulging your imperialist ambitions. If you can’t manage, don’t do it, why torture people? Northerners never complain about their lives, only when I was here in Novosibirsk, I realized how bad it is to live in Oymyakon.
P.S. In my memory, more foreigners (Japanese, Canadians, Americans, Norwegians) came to us in Oymyakon than Russians. Russian moneybags, arriving on separate planes just for fun, looked at the coldest place on Earth, and citizens of other countries were interested in how we live in such harsh conditions. They say that they even tried to help, but due to bureaucratic delays nothing came of it. I think this says a lot...
Oymyakon is best known as one of the “Poles of Cold” on the planet; according to a number of parameters, the Oymyakon Valley is the most severe place on Earth where a permanent population lives.
Geography
Oymyakon is located in subpolar latitudes, but south of the Arctic Circle. Day length varies from 4 hours 36 minutes (December 22) to 20 hours 28 minutes (June 22). From May 24 to July 21 there are white nights, when it is light all day long. From April 13 to August there are nights with astronomical twilight, and from May 1 to August 13 there are nights with navigational twilight.
The village is located at an altitude of 745 meters above sea level.
The nearest settlements are Khara-Tumul (the closest) and Bereg-Yurdya. Also not far from the village are the settlements of Tomtor, Yuchyugey and Airport.
Climate
Oymyakon has a rather complex climate. The climate is influenced by the latitude of the village, equal to 63.27 degrees (subpolar latitudes), great distance from the ocean (sharply continental climate), and location at an altitude of 741 meters above sea level (affected by altitudinal zone). Altitude lowers the temperature by 4 degrees compared to what it would be at sea level and increases the cooling of the air at night. In winter, cold air flows into the village, since it is located in a basin. Summer is short, with a large difference in daily temperatures; during the day it can be +30 °C and above, but at night the temperature can drop by 15-20 °C. The average annual atmospheric pressure in Oymyakon is 689 millimeters of mercury. The absolute minimum temperature at Oymyakon airport is −64.3 °C.
At the moment, the authorities of Yakutia have resolved the dispute in favor of Verkhoyansk, but the question remains open: a number of scientists and meteorological observations clearly indicate the advantage of Oymyakon in the dispute for the “frosty championship of the Northern Hemisphere.” Although the minimum average monthly temperature in Verkhoyansk in January is 3 degrees lower than in Oymyakon (-57.1 °C in 1892), and also lower on average in January, February, April, June, July, August and December, according to today's data The average annual temperature in Oymyakon is 0.3 degrees lower than in Verkhoyansk, and the absolute minimum, according to unofficial data, is 12.2 degrees lower. If we take official data, the temperature will rise by 4.4 degrees.
| Comparison of the climate of Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Index | Jan. | Feb. | March | Apr. | May | June | July | Aug. | Sep. | Oct. | Nov. | Dec. | |
| Temperature difference, average temperature in Oymyakon compared to Verkhoyansk | +0.9 | +0,6 | -0.3 | +2.6 | -1,3 | +0.3 | +0,2 | +0,6 | -0,4 | -2,6 | -1,3 | +0,5 | |
Temperature observation technique
It is necessary to clarify the location of meteorological observations. Regular weather observations are carried out at Oymyakon airport, which is located 40 km from the village of the same name and 2 km from the village Tomtor. However, when talking about minimum temperatures, the name is always used Oymyakon. This is due to the fact that Oymyakon is not only the name of the village, but also the name of the area.
In addition to the extreme cold in winter, in summer Oymyakon experiences temperatures above +30 °C. On July 28, 2010, a heat record (as well as monthly and absolute) was recorded in the village. Then the air warmed up to +34.6 °C. The difference between the absolute maximum and minimum temperatures is more than one hundred degrees, and according to this indicator, Oymyakon ranks one of the first places in the world. Also in Oymyakon the largest amplitude of average monthly temperatures is observed.
According to unofficial data, in 1938 the temperature in the village was −77.8 °C. The Antarctic Vostok station recorded the lowest temperature on Earth (-89.2 °C), but the station is located at an altitude of 3488 m above sea level, and, if both temperatures are adjusted to sea level, it is the coldest place on the planet Oymyakon will be recognized (-68.3 and −77.6 degrees, respectively).
| Climate of Oymyakon (data since 1930). | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Index | Jan. | Feb. | March | Apr. | May | June | July | Aug. | Sep. | Oct. | Nov. | Dec. | Year |
| Absolute maximum, °C | −16,6 | −12,5 | 2,0 | 11,7 | 26,2 | 31,1 | 34,6 | 32,9 | 23,7 | 11,0 | −2,1 | −6,5 | 34,6 |
| Average maximum, °C | −42,5 | −35,4 | −20,8 | −3,7 | 9,1 | 20,0 | 22,7 | 18,2 | 8,9 | −9,2 | −30,7 | −42 | −8,8 |
| Average temperature, °C | −46,4 | −42 | −31,2 | −13,6 | 2,7 | 12,6 | 14,9 | 10,3 | 2,3 | −14,8 | −35,2 | −45,5 | −15,5 |
| Average minimum, °C | −50 | −47,3 | −40 | −23,9 | −4,7 | 4,0 | 6,2 | 2,6 | −3,7 | −20,4 | −39,3 | −48,8 | −22,1 |
| Absolute minimum, °C | −65,4 | −64,6 | −60,6 | −46,4 | −28,9 | −9,7 | −9,3 | −17,1 | −25,3 | −47,6 | −58,5 | −62,8 | −65,4 |
| Precipitation rate | |||||||||||||