“POLE OF COLDNESS”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1938, Page 8

“POLE OF COLDNESS”

EXPLORATIONS BY SOVIET SCIENTISTS

LAND OF ICE-WATER FOUNTAINS

Russian natural scientists have set out to explore one of the coldest places on earth, the land of the ice-water fountains.

It is a stretch of 58 square miles in the Yakutia region of Siberia, where the temperature drops to 70 deg below zero Fahrenheit. Only in one other place, Antarctica, has the thermometer gone lower.

Known as the “pole of coldness,” the region, resembling a vast skating rink in winter, will be visited for a year by an expedition of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The expedition expected to pitch its camp by the end of this month

The icefield which forms every winter at. the spot between Verkhoyansk and Sredne-Kolymsk is said by Soviet authorities to be the largest on land in the world. It forms from a mysterious seepage of water from the beds of the small rivers Kyra and Nekhoran, coating the region with ice to a thickness of 10ft in some places. The rise of the water in spring-like gushes at the amazing rate of 140 to 280 cubic feet a second through the soil, as reported in the newspaper, ‘lzvestia,’ is the chief phenomenon to be studied. Some believe these tremendous gushes are the result of atmospheric precipitations accumulating in the soil, others that the water springs from deep layers of the earth’s crust.

The researches had to travel from Moscow by train for a long distance, then ride 800 njiles in automobiles to Yakutsk; travel by horses to Verkhoyansk, and thence by reindeer 230 miles to the icefield.

The expedition took along food, four tents, a radio station, drilling machines, and a laboratory. The tents are only for the first three months, the period during which the natural scientists will building a log house on the spot of their research.