---
title: "Siberia’s Oymyakon, the coldest permanently inhabited village on Earth, once hit nearly minus 68°C"
url: https://badiyaa.com/oymyakon-siberia-coldest-inhabited-village/
published: 2026-11-11T08:31:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-11T08:31:00+00:00
section: Offbeat
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Siberia’s Oymyakon, the coldest permanently inhabited village on Earth, once hit nearly minus 68°C

Oymyakon in Siberia is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with a 1933 reading near minus 68°C and schools that close only below minus 55°C.

In Oymyakon, a village of about 560 people in eastern Siberia, schools close only when the thermometer drops below minus 55°C (minus 67°F). The village is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth.

Oymyakon sits in Russia’s Sakha Republic, also called Yakutia, on the Indigirka River in the Yana-Oymyakon Highlands, 30 kilometers northwest of Tomtor on the Kolyma Highway. Its 2010 census count was 462, and a 2021 estimate put it at 560, according to the [village’s reference entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon).

## How cold it gets

On February 6, 1933, the weather station at Oymyakon recorded minus 67.7°C (minus 89.9°F). The World Meteorological Organization, in a 2020 statement, lists the village’s 1933 reading at minus 67.8°C, level with Verkhoyansk’s 1892 low, and for decades those two Russian sites shared the Northern Hemisphere record.

That record fell in 2020, when the WMO accepted a reading of minus 69.6°C (minus 93.3°F) from an automatic weather station called Klinck, high on the Greenland Ice Sheet, taken on December 22, 1991. Nobody lives at Klinck, which is why Oymyakon still holds the title for a place where people actually live. The world record, minus 89.2°C, belongs to Antarctica’s Vostok station.

A monument in the town square marks an unofficial January 1924 reading of minus 71.2°C, but that number has never been verified.

## Why the valley is so cold

Geography does most of the work. The station sits in a valley at about 750 meters, ringed by mountains around 1,100 meters high, so dense cold air drains down and pools at the bottom. In winter, temperatures in the area can rise by as much as 10°C as you climb higher. The surrounding peaks also block warmer winds, the village is far from any ocean, and in midwinter it gets only a few hours of daylight. In December, the station logs about 14 hours of sunshine for the entire month.

The ground never thaws all the way: Oymyakon sits on continuous permafrost. It has never recorded a temperature above freezing between October 26 and March 16, and the average January day hovers around minus 45.7°C.

## Summers that hit 30°C

The surprise is July. Summer days above 30°C (86°F) are not rare, and on July 28, 2010, Oymyakon reached 34.6°C (94.3°F). That gives the village a recorded range of 102.3°C between its coldest and hottest readings.

Put that in kitchen terms: the 102.3-degree gap between Oymyakon’s record low and record high is wider than the 100-degree gap between water freezing and boiling at sea level. In Fahrenheit, it spans more than 184 degrees.

## Life in the village

Oymyakon’s population once peaked at roughly 2,500 and has shrunk over recent decades. Fur trading and ice fishing drive the local economy. During World War II, an airfield was built nearby for the Alaska-Siberia air route, used to ferry American Lend-Lease aircraft to the Soviet front, and the village lies close to the Kolyma road known as the Road of Bones.

The name may come from an Even word for an unfrozen patch of water where fish spend the winter, though another account links it to a word meaning “frozen lake.”

For more on extreme cold, Badiyaa has covered how [a landslide wave in Greenland’s Dickson Fjord rang the planet for nine days](https://badiyaa.com/dickson-fjord-greenland-seiche-seismic-signal/) and the Canadian diver who [became the first woman to dive off an iceberg](https://badiyaa.com/molly-carlson-iceberg-dive-newfoundland/).

The coldest stretch is just ahead: December and January in Oymyakon average a daily minimum below minus 48°C.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Oymyakon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon)

*Image: Ilya Varlamov, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*