Vostok Station

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A Russian station high on the East Antarctic plateau, at an elevation of well over three kilometres and far from any coast, where the lowest reliably measured air temperature on the Earth's surface was recorded on 21 July 1983: minus 89.2 degrees Celsius. Satellite thermal imaging has since identified snow-surface temperatures near minus 98 degrees Celsius in shallow hollows on the plateau, but that is a skin temperature of the snow measured from orbit and is not the same quantity as a screen air temperature at a station, and conflating the two is the commonest error made about this record. Vostok also sits above Lake Vostok, a large body of liquid water sealed beneath roughly four kilometres of ice, and the deep ice core drilled there yielded one of the long records of atmospheric composition that made the ice-core reconstruction of past climate possible.