"By causing the air to be stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space, you get the absolute lowest temperatures we're able to find," Scambos said. "We suspected that we would be looking for one magical site that got extremely cold, but what we found was a large strip of Antarctica at high altitude that regularly reached these record low temperatures."
The study is an example of some of the intriguing science possible with Landsat 8 and the TIRS instrument, which was built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Since its launch Feb. 11, Landsat 8 has captured approximately 550 scenes per day of Earth's land surface. USGS processes, archives and distributes the images free of charge over the Internet.
"With Landsat 8, we expect to see more accurate and more detailed maps of the landscape than we've ever been able to see," said James Irons, the mission's project scientist at Goddard. "If change is occurring, I think we'll be able to detect it earlier and track it."
Researchers also are eager to see what new results come out of Landsat 8, both from icy plateaus and Earth's warmer regions.
"What we've got orbiting Earth right now is a very accurate and consistent sensor that can tell us all kinds of things about how the land surface of Earth is changing, how climate change is impacting the surface of Earth, the oceans of Earth, and the icy areas of Earth," Scambos said. "Finding the coldest areas on Earth is just the beginning of the discoveries we're going to be able to make with Landsat 8."
The coldest place on earth is in the East Antarctic Plateau, but not at the highest peak. Rather, the coldest spots develop just downhill from a ridge that runs from Dome A to Dome Fuji. Data from NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite, and NASA's MODIS sensor on the Aqua satellite. Time: 2.4 minutes
(Photo Credit: NASA)
This is a narrated animation showing the process by which the coldest place on earth develops its extreme low temperatures.
(Photo Credit: NASA)
With remote-sensing satellites, scientists have found the coldest places on Earth, just off a ridge in the East Antarctic Plateau. The coldest of the cold temperatures dropped to minus 135.8 F (minus 93.2 C) -- several degrees colder than the previous record.
(Photo Credit: Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center)
Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center