Name: Why 400,000 People Live in Earth's Coldest City
Uploaded: 2026-03-30T16:57:57.000Z
Duration: 28 min 28 s
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Of all the major cities in the world with, uh, questionable locations, there's got to be one of them that's the most questionable of all, and

Adverbs of manner

I'd argue that it's probably this place in the middle of Siberia.

Here in the depths of winter, the average low temperature will hover around -42 degrees Celsius, and

entire weeks can pass by where it never gets above -40 at all.

That's cold enough that if you dare to venture outside, your exposed fingers can receive frostbite damage in as little as 3 to 7 minutes, while your exposed nose and cheeks can receive frostbite damage between 5 and 8 minutes, even if the rest of your body is completely bundled up appropriately.

Engine oil used in cars can begin to thicken like glue and even freeze at these kinds of temperatures.

Fuel lines will freeze, batteries will die, tires will split open, and

even metal can become brittle and crack when you hit it, which leads to residents of this city usually running their car engines for hours overnight during the winter, which leaves parking lots looking like huge fields of idling vehicles.

Groceries bought at the store might freeze solid by the time you get back home, and

it's so brutally cold that fish for sale in markets can simply be left outside on display for days or even weeks at a time, because the ambient temperature outside is going to be colder than any freezer and it'll preserve them all the same.

This extreme city's name is Yakutsk, a place that's probably most well known to Westerners as a space on the board game Risk, but

with a surprisingly large population of more than 370,000 people today in the real world, it is far from your typical small Arctic outpost.

There is no bigger settlement that can be found in any direction for thousands of kilometers, while Yakutsk is also, notably, the largest city in the world that's ever been founded within the permafrost zone, the regions in the northern hemisphere where the soil remains permanently frozen year-round and have remained frozen for thousands of years, and

where conducting agriculture, growing your own food, and supporting a large population are all very, very difficult.

And so what's even stranger then is the density of the population in Yakutsk relative to its overall region.

The city is the capital of Russia's Sakha region, the largest country subdivision in the world that's roughly twice the size of Alaska.

Placed over the United States, Sakha is so huge that it would encompass basically the entire eastern half of the country.

And yet, across this entire huge stretch of territory lives fewer than 1 million people today, nearly 40% of whom all just live within the capital city of Yakutsk, surrounded by a hinterland that can hardly support any agriculture at all.

Yakutsk is a genuinely big city and a thriving regional capital complete with universities, theaters, shopping malls, and

high-rise apartments that all exist in this brutal environment that makes it by far the coldest major city on the planet.

The coldest temperature ever recorded in Yakutsk during the winter is about -64 degrees Celsius, an almost unbelievable sensation if you've never experienced it that's even colder than the surface of Mars gets during some seasons.

In the same general area where Yakutsk is located, the absolute lowest temperatures ever recorded on our planet have been measured anywhere outside of Antarctica and Greenland, and

yet neither of those places have a metropolis home to hundreds of thousands of residents.

Yakutsk is thus a truly bizarre anomaly in the world of human geography, and

for many more reasons than just its cold environment.

And that begs the ultimate question: why does a big city of this significant a size even exist at all within an environment that is so objectively hostile to human life?

And what sort of unique challenges does living and working in the world's coldest city entail for your everyday person there?

The area around modern-day Yakutsk has been inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years, but

was always extremely remote and sparsely populated for basically all of history until relatively modern times because of the climate.

It's basically like a late-game settlement in one of the Sid Meier Civilization games that you found just in order to gain access to the area's resources.

The ethnic Yakut people, who refer to themselves as the Sakha, migrated into the area around Yakutsk sometime around the 13th and 14th centuries from the northern shores of Lake Baikal further to the south, after they were displaced by the expanding Mongols.

A Turkic people, the Yakuts are the northernmost of all the world's Turkic ethnic groups today and their language is closely related to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages in Central Asia.

Beginning in the mid-16th century, the Russian state began its centuries of expansion across Siberia in the hunt for valuable resources like fur, which was used as both a form of currency and a product that could be exported.

In 1632, Russian explorers at the frontier of their expanding empire first entered into the heartland of the Sakha deep in Siberia, where they founded a small fort that would eventually become the modern metropolis of Yakutsk.

By the 1640s, the Russians had managed to fully subjugate the Sakha people.

At this early point in the settlement's history, the fort of Yakutsk was utilized as a place to receive tribute paid in furs from the local Sakha and other peoples in the area, in exchange for the Russians generally leaving them alone to their own affairs.

At the time, nobody could have possibly envisioned that this remote colonial outpost dedicated to harvesting fur would eventually become a major metropolis in the future.

But Yakutsk did have at least one major geographic advantage going for it that would later help out its growth potential: its location along the Lena River.

The Lena is a very, very significant global river system.

It's actually the 11th longest river in the world, and

it stretches for thousands of kilometers from its source at Lake Baikal in the south to its delta in the Arctic Ocean in the north, with tributaries that fan out all across the region.

And Yakutsk was well positioned along the Lena River to control this whole system.

And during the summer season, the river is actually perfectly navigable for a huge length of 3,540 kilometers, making it a great river transportation network during the summer.

The key phrase, of course, is during the summer, because this navigability only lasts for about 70 to 125 days out of the year depending on the exact location.

And that's the only time that the Lena remains navigable because for more than two-thirds of the rest of the year, the whole river is either frozen solid or it's full of little icebergs that make any and all navigation across it impossible.

Nonetheless, as a seasonally useful inland port, Yakutsk was an ideal frontier location to receive furs to ship upstream the Lena down towards Lake Baikal, where from there it was easier to export overland further towards the core in European Russia, especially after the later advent of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

For centuries until the mid-1800s, the Sakha region was basically entirely exploited by the Russians as a resource colony that almost completely focused on fur.

Because the soil in the region was largely covered by permafrost, relying on agriculture to sustain the economy around the settlement was never going to be a successful endeavor, and

that also kept the region's population and labor force low since they couldn't really grow their own food supply, limiting the region's economic potential beyond resource exploitation even further.

By the end of the 19th century, Yakutsk was basically still just a small frontier town that hardly anyone had ever heard of, that recorded a population of only about 6,500 people in the 1897 Russian Empire census, with the overwhelming majority of ethnic Russians in the town still involved in the fur trade.

But then, across the 20th century, everything would begin rapidly changing for the town.

After the Soviet Union was established in 1922, the territory of Sakha was reorganized into the Yakut Autonomous SSR, basically a semi-autonomous territory of the Russian SSR, a status that it largely inherited within Russia after the Soviet collapse in the 1990s.

And the very next year afterwards, in 1923, the new, modern era of Yakutsk finally began when gold was discovered by Soviet geologists in the south of the Sakha region.

Within only two years from then, by 1925, more than 13,000 ethnic Slavs from Russia and Ukraine had flooded into the territory in the search for gold and fortune.

The Sakha territory's gold rush had begun, and it would never be the same ever again.

The Soviet government under Stalin concluded that the amount of voluntary labor present in Sakha, who were actually willing to mine for gold, was far too insufficient to actually harvest the amount of gold they wanted.

So they began bringing in huge numbers of involuntary labor instead through the infamous gulag system.

Across Stalin's reign, around a hundred different camps, prisons, and

penal colonies were established in the gulag system all across the Sakha territory, and

at least 50,000 prisoners were brought into them who were primarily used for labor in the gold mines.

In a sense, this was only a dramatic continuation of the old Tsarist policies in Siberia, which had long treated Yakutsk and the Sakha territory specifically as effectively a prison without any walls, in addition to its use as a resource colony.

Political dissidents who were exiled to the Sakha territory didn't need to be kept under constant surveillance or even housed in prisons.

Nothing else existed for thousands of kilometers in any direction, and

the odds of survival out there alone in the brutal wilderness and climate were effectively zero, making its location perfect as a dumping ground for people who were politically or socially undesirable by both the Tsarist and later Soviet regimes alike.

All of this during the Stalinist era made the population of both Yakutsk and the Sakha territory more broadly explode.

Between 1926 and 1959, the population of Yakutsk, the city, expanded by more than seven times over from only around 10,000 people to more than 70,000, while the ethnic Yakuts or Sakha themselves were diluted for more than 80% of the overall territory's population in 1926 to less than half of the population by 1959 due to the influx of all of the Russians and Ukrainians from the European core of the Soviet Union.

And as it turned out, gold was far from the only valuable resource to be found in the area, and

it wouldn't even be the most valuable resource either.

As early as the 1930s, Soviet geologists were commenting on the similar nature of the geography found in Siberia to South Africa, which led to a lot of speculation that Siberia probably had rich diamond deposits just like South Africa had.

After the Second World War momentarily interrupted all of the exploration efforts for them, the first rough diamond in the Sakha region was finally discovered by Soviet geologists in 1949.

And then five years later, in 1954, shortly after Stalin's death, they hit the motherload in a rich kimberlite pipe in Sakha that they called Zarnitsa.

And as it soon turned out from there, the Sakha territory is actually the most diamond-rich area in the world that's ever been discovered anywhere outside of southern Africa.

And this is what truly caused the even more rapid explosion in the territory's population across the second half of the 20th century, as even more Russians and Ukrainians began migrating in in search of diamond fortune.

By the end of the 20th century, the Sakha territory was producing as much as 25% of the world's entire supply of diamonds.

And entire cities were built up from scratch around all of the various mines that were built using prefabricated housing and staffed with workforces that were largely imported from the European core.

During the Soviet era, the salary that a worker could earn in the diamond mines in Sakha was roughly four times greater than the Soviet average, with generous bonuses paid on top, which was more than enough to attract tens of thousands of new people to move to the territory despite its brutal climate and working and living conditions.

And all of this led to the rise in population and development of Sakha's capital, Yakutsk, where the big diamond and gold mining operations all began establishing their regional offices and headquarters at.

Since the 1960s, every single year, more than $1 billion worth of diamonds have been mined up from the Sakha territory, and

by the end of the 1980s, diamond and gold mining, along with smaller tin and coal mining operations, were collectively bringing about $4 billion into the Soviet treasury every year, a fortune that has led to the increasingly rapid development of the regional capital at Yakutsk.

Between 1959 and 1989, roughly from when the diamond industry just started getting going to just before the Soviet Union's collapse, the population of Yakutsk more than doubled again from 74,000 people to more than 186,000 people, complete with high-rise apartments, museums, factories, and

Meaning that by the twilight years of the Soviet era, Yakutsk had already become a fairly large city from basically nothing, almost entirely because of the emergence of the diamond and gold mining industries in the region.

The biggest symbol of Soviet and Russian mining operations that emerged in the Sakha territory is the Mere Open Pit Mine, currently the fourth deepest open pit mine globally and one of the largest man-made holes on the planet.

That's 525 meters deep and more than a full kilometer wide.

This hole is so big that helicopters have been restricted from flying over it because of the turbulent air currents that the hole generates above it.

In their search for even more valuable minerals in the territory, the Soviets also conducted a series of underground nuclear explosions across the Sakha territory as well, that continue to plague the region's environment to this day.

Over a period of about 14 years, between 1974 and 1988, the Soviets are known to have conducted at least 12 of these underground nuclear explosions in the Sakha territory that attempted to either use their seismic waves to locate further minerals or to utilize their explosive power to dig out mines in place of conventional explosives.

But in the end, all they really did was result in radioactive contamination of the territory's soil and aquifers that have made life even more difficult than it already was naturally.

And of course, the natural environment around Yakutsk is absolutely brutal.

And that has always made developing a city here very unique and challenging.

There are many natural factors that combine to make the area around Yakutsk the coldest place on the planet anywhere outside of Antarctica and Greenland.

The city itself is located deep within the Eurasian continent, thousands of kilometers away from any nearby ocean.

Oceans generally moderate temperatures, but Yakutsk doesn't get to experience that.

And ironically, the climate a thousand kilometers away further to the north on the coastline of the Arctic Ocean is even milder than it is down in Yakutsk, with average January temperatures in the north of around -20 degrees Celsius compared to -40 degrees Celsius further to the south inland in Yakutsk.

The Siberian High, the strongest high-pressure weather system in the northern hemisphere, always brings in a massive amount of extremely cold, dry air from the Arctic that gets trapped inland over central Siberia every winter between September and April.

That significantly affects the climate around Yakutsk as well, exacerbated by the omnipresent snow-covered taiga and plains that reflect sunlight that further helps to maintain the extremely low temperatures.

The result is that weeks at a time in Yakutsk can go without ever rising above -40 degrees Celsius in the winter.

The coldest temperature ever recorded in the city is an almost unbelievable -64 degrees Celsius, while the temperature has never been recorded over freezing in the city once between November 10th and March 14th.

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Why 400,000 People Live in Earth's Coldest City

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