Transcripts of G2013-096_Coldest_viz

It's an incredible place to be. It's desolate and yet it's compelling in a lot of ways. There's a sense that humans have never been in these areas much before. There's a strong sense that really humans don't have any place there. It's not a comfortable continent. But at the same time it's stark and beautiful and amazing. Way up at the top of the ice sheet about 13,000 to 14,000 feet, it's actually a very flat plain, but it's slightly higher than all the area around it. That's the area we started looking at. There's a lot of atmospheric science and climate science that's behind what produces the coldest termperatures in Antarctica. The home of all of that is this area along the ridge, the highest part of the ridge in East Antarctica, where if conditions are right, temperatures plummet to extremely low levels, past the previous record low temperatures recorded by the Russians at a base called Vostok. What we found was that the coldest temperatures are actually just off of the crest. The crest is an area where the air, as soon as it gets to a low temperature, starts to drain away What you need is a place where that air is actually caught and held for a while, so that it can cool down still more by radiating away into space, and those are the places where we're finding these very very low temperatures. You might say, let's go there, and maybe in summer that's a reasonable thing to try and do.... It's really cold. And so things like your ordinary thermometers, a mercury thermometer won't work and alchohol thermometer will have a lot of trouble. Were talking temperatures that are 50°C colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska, or in Siberia, or certainly in North Dakota or Montana