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The five coldest places on Earth

Have you noticed a bit of a chill in the air? If so, you're not alone. But take heart: here are five places that will make today seem like T-shirt weather.

1. As cold as it gets

Newscom/File
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.

  • By Eoin O'Carroll Staff

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.

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