Polar Climate and the Polar Vortex

The Arctic and Antarctic represent two distinct polar climates. The Arctic is an ocean basin surrounded by land, its temperature moderated somewhat by heat stored in seawater beneath the sea ice, while Antarctica is a continent covered by a high-elevation ice sheet, far colder because elevation, continentality, and near-total isolation from moderating ocean heat combine to allow extreme radiative cooling. The lowest surface air temperature ever directly measured by a thermometer on Earth was recorded at Russia's Vostok Station, at an elevation of 3,488 meters on the East Antarctic plateau, on 21 July 1983: -89.2°C, a reading recognized by the World Meteorological Organization. Satellite-based analysis by Scambos et al. (2018) in Geophysical Research Letters later identified even colder surface skin temperatures, down to about -93.2°C, in shallow topographic hollows between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji — a remote-sensing estimate rather than a direct thermometer reading, and so not recognized as an official WMO record.