Coldest Spot On Planet Earth Identified

Thorfinn.au sends this news from NASA: "What is the coldest place on Earth? It is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 92 degrees Celsius) on a clear winter night. Scientists made the discovery while analyzing the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., joined a team of researchers reporting the findings Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Researchers analyzed 32 years' worth of data from several satellite instruments. They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau. The new record of minus 93.2 C was set Aug. 10, 2010."

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think will happen to all the runoff, Einstein? You'll wind up with your radiator encased in an ice bubble, and a foot of water in your datacenter.

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it the snow or the altitude that's causing your cooling woes (or maybe both)? Cooling performance will be negatively impacted with increased altitude and lower air pressure. Telecom equipment environmental operating requirements (like those defined in GR-63/NEBS, for example) often allow equipment to be derated when operated above certain altitudes (e.g. 1800m in the NEBS case).

Re:That is fucking cold.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law

It is close to being able to create solid CO2, but the pressure at the altitude might have caused it to remain a cold gas. I'm also not sure how much CO2 is at that location. It isn't China bad down there.

Re:That is fucking cold.

[careysub]

Wow. So, what happens the atmospheric CO2 in that case? Would it precipitate as "dry ice" snow?

Vapor pressure of carbon dioxide at -100 C: 100 mm. Actual partial pressure of CO2 on average in Earth's lower atmosphere: 0.3 mm. Partial pressure of CO2 in exhaled breath: 38 mm. So no, no dry ice snow - the vapor pressure is still too high. At around -110 C the possibility of "dry ice frost breath" becomes possible. It would have to be near -140 C before CO2 would start condensing out of the air.

Re:That is fucking cold.

[amaurea]

CO2 freezes at 78 C at a partial pressure of 1 atmosphere. That means that if the atmosphere were 100% CO2, and we were at sea level, but still at -93 C, then there would be CO2 snowing out of the atmosphere. However, the partial pressure of CO2 is much lower than 1 atmosphere simply because so little of the atmosphere is CO2. Since only 0.0397% of the air is CO2, and the local pressure (due to the high altitude) is about 0.65 atm, the partial pressure will be 2.6e-5 atmospheres. At that partial pressure the CO2 freezing temperature is less than -140 C [wordpress.com] (I couldn't find a diagram that went quite far enough down in pressure).

The physical reason for this is that there are two competing processes involved. CO2 molecules bumping into a solid speck of CO2 and getting stuck (freezing), and CO2 molecules shaking loose from a solid (sublimation). But the former process proceeds faster the more CO2 gas there is, i.e. the more often these collisions happen. Hence the dependence on the partial pressure.

Re:Cool!

[TapeCutter]

That is basically the GP's point, a snow covered data centre is like an igloo, the heat generated by the servers/people inside can't escape so it becomes a lot warmer that the surrounding ice, but due to the large amount of ice it's thermal inertia ensures the walls don't melt. You need to get past the ice to dissipate the heat effectively. Old English pubs with 3 foot thick stone walls don't need heaters when full for exactly the same reason.