Starship Asterisk*

neufer wrote:

orin stepanek wrote:
The coldest place on Earth? I wouldn't go there! There is enough cold here in Nebraska!

We all know, Orin, that if they offered you the chance to be the first man to land on Pluto you couldn't possibly refuse.

Remo wrote:Have you ever slept out at night on a clear night in the desert or someplace else with a dry atmosphere. It can feel brutally cold even though the air temperature is not that low, and you can get frost in the morning on your sleeping bag. Why? Because half your body is staring out at 2.73 K, with little IR radiating back down from the warmer air. The atmosphere is "optically thin".

neufer wrote:

biddie67 wrote:
It seems that from the South Pole, every point is "north". If "west" is to one's right when looking at a map facing northward, Antarctica's "west" would change as one turned around ... As silly as it sounds, how did West and East Antarctica get their names?

• It was an occidental coincidence:

Chris Peterson wrote:
I've had dog water bowls ice over when the air temperature was around 50°F.

Nitpicker wrote:They are in metres and indicate the elevation of the top of the ice. The highest elevation in Antarctica is almost 5000m, at Vinson Massif in western Antarctica, although that area is not nearly as vast as the eastern ice shelf.

According to this link, if you don't consider the ice, the highest elevation in Antarctica is less than 3000m:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartne ... l-the-ice/

Cousin Ricky wrote:

Nitpicker wrote:They are in metres and indicate the elevation of the top of the ice. The highest elevation in Antarctica is almost 5000m, at Vinson Massif in western Antarctica, although that area is not nearly as vast as the eastern ice shelf.

According to this link, if you don't consider the ice, the highest elevation in Antarctica is less than 3000m:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartne ... l-the-ice/

I have flown over Vinson Massif. There are not 2 km of ice on top of that mountain.

neufer wrote: But I was questioning your comment: "the highest elevation in Antarctica is less than 3000m"

Chris Peterson wrote:

Remo wrote:Have you ever slept out at night on a clear night in the desert or someplace else with a dry atmosphere. It can feel brutally cold even though the air temperature is not that low, and you can get frost in the morning on your sleeping bag. Why? Because half your body is staring out at 2.73 K, with little IR radiating back down from the warmer air. The atmosphere is "optically thin".

Not that thin!

The temperature of a clear, dry sky is usually around -40°C (the lowest I've measured is -70°C). That is determined by the radiative properties of several constituents, particularly water.

The sky is cold, which is why we can easily get frost when the air temperature is above freezing. But thankfully, the sky isn't at 2.7 K!

I monitor the weather here, and my thermometer is on a rise, so it pretty accurately reflects the true air temperature. The biggest extreme I've seen from radiative cooling was a measurement of 14°F from my station, and a simultaneous measurement a couple of miles away, in a valley, of -34°F. I've had dog water bowls ice over when the air temperature was around 50°F.

Beyond wrote:See what happens when you go the 'illegal' route

Ann wrote:
I thought temperatures on the ground are usually colder than temperatures some two meters above ground.

I remember an evening several years ago in December. It had been raining, and it was overcast. The thermometer outside my window said that the air temperature next to my house was about +4. Suddenly it cleared up. It was dark outside, unsurprisingly (in Sweden we get about eight hours of daylight and sixteen hours of darkness in December). I was going somewhere, so I got my bicycle, mounted it, cycled (illegally) a short distance along a path until I had to make a sharp turn when I got to the street. When I made that sharp turn, I immediately fell. Even though the air temperature was well above freezing, the wetness on the pavement had turned into a smooth sheet of ice when the clouds parted. It was incredibly slippery.

EdMars wrote:
When defending the metric system to all those darn Americans out there like myself, I've always challenged people to wonder what the temperature of zero would possibly represent on the Fahrenheit scale? (I know the temperature of the human body was "supposed" to be one hundred degrees, but that still doesn't answer the question.) Isn't is interesting that the Earth itself practically provides the answer!!! (In other words, "What temperature in degrees F. would you get awfully close to if you averaged the highest recorded temperature on Earth with the lowest?") What a wonderfully weird coincidence, huh?!

• It's frigorific

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit wrote:
<<Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (24 May 1686 – 16 September 1736) was a Dutch-German-Polish physicist, engineer, and glass blower who is best known for inventing the mercury-in-glass thermometer (1714), and for developing a temperature scale now named after him.

According to Fahrenheit's 1724 article, he determined his scale by reference to three fixed points of temperature. The lowest temperature was achieved by preparing a frigorific mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride (a salt), and waiting for it to reach equilibrium. The thermometer then was placed into the mixture and the liquid in the thermometer allowed to descend to its lowest point. The thermometer's reading there was taken as 0 °F. The second reference point was selected as the reading of the thermometer when it was placed in still water when ice was just forming on the surface. This was assigned as 32 °F. The third calibration point, taken as 96 °F, was selected as the thermometer's reading when the instrument was placed under the arm or in the mouth.

Work by others showed that water boils about 180 degrees above its freezing point. The Fahrenheit scale later was redefined to make the freezing-to-boiling interval exactly 180 degrees, a convenient value as 180 is a highly composite number, meaning that it is evenly divisible into many fractions. It is because of the scale's redefinition that normal body temperature today is taken as 98.6 degrees, whereas it was 96 degrees on Fahrenheit's original scale. The Fahrenheit scale is still used for everyday temperature measurements by the general population in the United States and Belize and, less so, in the UK and Canada.>>

weberpxw wrote:
Can you add more to put this into context? Is this new record low temperature a sign of cooling of the Antarctic region, or is it simply from looking in a place where no one has generally looked before?

weberpxw wrote:
The Vostok record is for an inhabited place, and the new record is a very remote site. It would be interesting to know if the location of the new record low has seen even colder temperatures in the past. And, how far back do the temperature records at Vostok go?

• 56 years as of December 16

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station wrote:
<<Vostok station was established on 16 December 1957 (during the International Geophysical Year) by the 2nd Soviet Antarctic Expedition and was operated year-round for more than 37 years. The station was temporarily closed from February to November 1994.

Vostok is the World Pole of Cold. During the long winter, temperatures average about −65 °C; in the brief summer, about −30 °C. The lowest reliably measured temperature on Earth of −89.2 °C was in Vostok on 21 July 1983. This beat the station's former record of -88.3°C on 24 August 1960. Though unconfirmed, it has been reported that Vostok reached the temperature of −91 °C during the winter of 1997. Lower temperatures occurred higher up towards the summit of the ice sheet as temperature decreases with height along the surface.

Acclimatization to such conditions can take from a week to two months and is accompanied by headaches, eye twitches, ear pains, nose bleeds, perceived suffocation, sudden rises in blood pressure, loss of sleep, reduced appetite, vomiting, joint and muscle pain, arthritis, and weight loss of 3–5 kg.>>

weberpxw wrote:

I can certainly see Glenn Beck and many other scientific commentators picking on this announcement as further "proof" that no warming is happening on Earth.

...

Glenn Beck is a scientific commentator

Is Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee a scientific commentator

weberpxw wrote:Can you add more to put this into context? Is this new record low temperature a sign of cooling of the Antarctic region, or is it simply from looking in a place where no one has generally looked before? The Vostok record is for an inhabited place, and the new record is a very remote site. It would be interesting to know if the location of the new record low has seen even colder temperatures in the past. And, how far back do the temperature records at Vostok go?

I can certainly see Glenn Beck and many other scientific commentators picking on this announcement as further "proof" that no warming is happening on Earth.

geckzilla wrote:The politics rule is somehow the most difficult one to enforce here. :doh:

geckzilla wrote:Which is completely fair but I've noticed even the most simple mention of anything political has a tendency to quickly spiral out of control. Bob and Jerry have also communicated that they would never want APOD to appear partial to any political group and due to Asterisk's relationship with APOD this carries over to the forum. It drives me insane trying to figure out how to handle that.

Anthony Barreiro wrote:

neufer wrote:

biddie67 wrote:
It seems that from the South Pole, every point is "north". If "west" is to one's right when looking at a map facing northward, Antarctica's "west" would change as one turned around ... As silly as it sounds, how did West and East Antarctica get their names?

• It was an occidental coincidence:

Yes, those who draw the maps get to decide what to call the directions. In linguistics they say that "a language is a dialect with an army." I suppose in cartography it helps to have a navy.

BMAONE23 wrote:
The difference between eastern and western Antarctic regions is divided by the prime meridian and dateline. Western Antarctica resides in the western hemisphere west of the prime meridian and Eastern Antarctica falls east of the prime meridian, in the eastern hemisphere.

• Well...more or less.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Remo wrote:Have you ever slept out at night on a clear night in the desert or someplace else with a dry atmosphere. It can feel brutally cold even though the air temperature is not that low, and you can get frost in the morning on your sleeping bag. Why? Because half your body is staring out at 2.73 K, with little IR radiating back down from the warmer air. The atmosphere is "optically thin".

Not that thin!

The temperature of a clear, dry sky is usually around -40°C (the lowest I've measured is -70°C). That is determined by the radiative properties of several constituents, particularly water.

The sky is cold, which is why we can easily get frost when the air temperature is above freezing. But thankfully, the sky isn't at 2.7 K!

I monitor the weather here, and my thermometer is on a rise, so it pretty accurately reflects the true air temperature. The biggest extreme I've seen from radiative cooling was a measurement of 14°F from my station, and a simultaneous measurement a couple of miles away, in a valley, of -34°F. I've had dog water bowls ice over when the air temperature was around 50°F.

BMAONE23 wrote:

Anthony Barreiro wrote:Yes, those who draw the maps get to decide what to call the directions. In linguistics they say that "a language is a dialect with an army." I suppose in cartography it helps to have a navy.

The difference between eastern and western Antarctic regions is dividednby the prime meridian and dateline. Western Antarctica resides in the western hemisphere west of the prime meridian and Eastern Antarctica falls east of the prime meridian, in the eastern hemisphere.