The five coldest places on Earth

Noticed a chill in the air? You're not alone. A blast of subzero temperatures has swept the Northeast, closing schools, stalling cars, and collectively freezing billions of nose hairs.

The coldest temperature on Monday was recorded in New York's Adirondack Mountains, where Lake Saranac saw a low of –36°F. Boston woke up to temperatures of –2°F, actually colder than parts of the Arctic Circle.

Many Americans outside the Northeast weren't much warmer. Even Tallahassee, Fla., saw temperatures drop to 25°F. Outside the US, South Koreans are seeing the lowest temperatures in almost a century, prompting the government to require public agencies to keep the thermostat set below 64°F to save energy.

Still, these temperatures are downright balmy when compared to some places on Earth. Here's a list of sites that will make today seem like T-shirt weather.

- Eoin O'Carroll, Staff

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Scottish mathematician and physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, gives his final lecture at Glasgow University, 1899. Kelvin was among the first to formulate a lower limit to temperature, which he called absolute zero. In his honor, absolute temperatures are stated in kelvins. (Newscom/File)

1. As cold as it gets

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that it is impossible to cool a system to absolute zero, the temperature at which the movement of particles comes to a halt.

But scientists have gotten pretty close to zero degrees Kelvin (or −459.67 degrees F). In 1999, researchers in Helsinki cooled portions of a piece of rhodium metal to 100 picokelvins, just one tenth of one billionth of a degree above absolute zero. The researchers then presumably dared each other to lick it.