Eyelash freezing -67C in Siberia: Climate change denial will mean slow death of planet earth

You may think it is cold in Delhi-NCR and laugh at people from Mumbai donning their woollens on a balmy, 25 degrees Celsius day. But for the people living in Oymyakon (the name ironically means “non-freezing water”, after a thermal spring) in Siberia, this weather is not just pleasant, it may just be warm.

At -67 degrees Celsius (yes, you read that right), this village in frigid and cruel Siberia (in Russia’s remote Yakutia region) has temperatures so that low people there find themselves with frozen eyelashes. According to a report in Daily Mail, the village that is home to around just about 500 people, faces issues we cannot even imagine. Their day-to-day problems, in this icy weather, include pen ink freezing, glasses freezing to people's faces and batteries losing power.

According to the report, locals go so far as to leave their cars running all day for fear of not being able to restart them. In fact, just to bury coffins into the earth, bonfires are lit for a few hours to thaw the ground, following which hot coals are pushed to the side and a hole just a few inches deep is dug; and this process is repeated for several days until the hole is deep enough to bury the coffin.

An Associated Press report, on the other hand, claims that two men froze to death after they tried to walk in the chilling weather after their car broke down. The three other men with them survived only because they were wearing warmer clothes.

According to The Telegraph, while this Siberian village is nowhere close to the coldest place on the planet – the coldest temperature ever recorded on the planet was -94.7C, captured by a NASA satellite in east Antarctica in 2013 – this low temperature is definitely out of the ordinary for the folks at Oymyakon where the usual January temperature borders around -50 degrees Celsius.

This extreme temperature, sadly, should not come as a surprise to anyone. The effects of mass exploitation of the natural resources of this planet, coupled with unethical dumping of pollutants in air, water and land alike has long been flagged as a cause for serious climate change. And the effects are becoming more and more pronounced every day. A place as hot as the Sahara Desert recently experienced snowfall. America has been hit with something scientists are calling a “Bomb Cyclone”, and Australia has been the victim of extreme heat, something that is seriously harming the wildlife (particularly bats) in the island continent.

Unless drastic steps are taken to conserve what remains of this planet, it is only a matter of time before more and more parts of the world experience such climate anomalies. And by then, it may just be too late. 

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