Would You Live in the World’s Coldest City?

The Earth has a great number of extremes when it comes to landscape and topography. A fact that Geneva based photographer Steeve Iuncker decided to document in his project called Extreme Cities. He’s been around the globe to the highest city, most crowded one, and even the most polluted one. However the one that really left him in shivers is the world’s coldest city, Yakutsk, Russia.

This is the capital city of the Siberian region known as the Sakha Republic. In the summers the temperature rises to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, but the winters can chill at a regular of – 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest temperature ever recorded at the city center was a mind numbing – 83 degrees Fahrenheit.

As Iuncker remarked, everything is ice, fog and shadows in the city. It was a challenge for him to photograph outside because when he braved the cold and went out frost coated his camera. He cleaned out the frost only to realize that it’s internal mechanisms had literally frozen to a halt. It’s not a place for anyone with a delicate disposition.

The ground is so cold that it can’t be broken, neither for construction purposes nor for graves. The air is literally too cold to fly aircrafts and there is absolutely no way any crops will grow in the region. Markets don’t sell vegetables. Just cold, frozen fish. It would be interesting to conduct a science project listing how one could survive in these conditions.