Nasa finds the coldest place on the planet The coldest permanently inhabited place on the planet is in north eastern Siberia, where temperatures in the woes of Verkhoyansk and Oimekon dropped to -90F (-68C). Dr Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said: ."We had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and colder than Vostok because it's higher up the hill. With the launch of Landsat 8, we finally had a sensor capable of really investigating this area in more detail. The researchers started looking to find the coldest place on Earth after noticing strange cracks in the snow dunes on the East Antarctic Plateau. The cracks are through to occur when the upper snow layers shrink in the winter. Using global surface temperature maps, including those from Nasa's Landsat 8, they were able to scan the area. Dr Scambos, who presented his findings to the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, detected extremely cold temperatures on a 620-mile stretch of the ridge at high elevations between Argus and Fuji. Pockets below the ridge, which lay in almost permanent shadow, were found to have fallen to -133 on 10 August 2010. Thermal Infrared Sensor aboard Landsat 8 allowed his team to pinpoint the coldest spots. They found that after a series of days where the sky is clear, the ground radiates heat into space. This creates a layer of super-chilled air above the surface of the snow and ice. This layer of air is denser than the relatively warmer air above it, which causes it to slide down the shallow slope of domes on the Antarctic plateau. As it flows into the pockets, it can be trapped, and the cooling continues. Dr Scambos said: "By causing the air to be stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space, you get the absolute lowest temperatures we're able to find. We suspected that we would be looking for one magical site that got extremely cold, but what we found was a large strip of Antarctica at high altitude that regularly reached these record low temperatures.