We always admire the winter season for the coolness and coziness it offers. Winters are a season we wait for; even a small dip in temperatures is enough for us to take out our sweaters. But the coldest place in the world is experiencing a severity that has caused the thermometers to break! We are talking about a Siberian village Oymyakon. Oymyakon is a small village in Russia’s Yakutia region with about 500 residents. It has the reputation of being the world’s coldest region and this year the temperatures dipped like never before to minus 62 degrees! The locals claim it dropped even further to minus 68 degrees.

The cold is freezing beyond imagination. The authorities had installed a digital thermometer recently which broke after recording the temperature of -62 degrees. Forget freezing your legs and hands, here within moments of stepping out, people’s hair and eyelashes freeze! Oymyakon has temperatures as low as -50 degrees in the month of January but the effects of climate change have been felt here more severely.

Sustaining in a place like this is no mean feat. It is dark for 21 hours of the day in winters. There are no plane landings and it takes up to two days by car to reach the major city nearby. But the residents do withstand the conditions year after year. Their winter diet is mostly meat-based, raw or frozen and frozen fishes as well. In fact, reindeer meat is a specialty of the region. There is no possibility of crops growing in the snow-covered land. Even the bathrooms here are outhouses, because the ground is too frozen for pipes. So if you want to go to the loo, you still need to bear the outside cold.

The moment you step out, your face is covered in frost. To live here, the adaptation skills are a must. The people have to leave their cars running, even when not in use to prevent the batteries from freezing. But this very repute of being the coldest has some tourists heading here to experience the chill. Some Chinese tourists came here and took a swim in the spring here!

To even think of such a colder environment is giving us the chill. Leaving aside the fact that the people here are adapted to such conditions, it is a grave reminder of the climate change the entire globe is going through.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 17, 2018 05:09 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).