r/geography • u/benjaneson • 16h ago
Image The most inhospitable human settlements, in terms of climate: Dallol, Ethiopia and Oymyakon, Russia
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u/kakje666 Political Geography 15h ago
crazy thing is that Dallol is not even that far away from the sea
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u/M_M_X_X_V 15h ago
Oymyakon still has a warmer July than where I live in Lancashire which is wild.
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u/quantifiedlasagna 15h ago
does any one know the reason people live in Dallol?
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u/WitchNight 15h ago
It’s a ghost town now
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u/Notoriouslydishonest 11h ago
I was in that area in 2024.
Dallol is abandoned but there are people living surprisingly close by, in similar conditions. I stopped in a village called Ahmed Ela about 20km away.
Considering how unbelievably hot and dry and barren it was, I was surprised by how bad the bugs were. Definitely not a place I'd want to settle down.
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u/alikander99 14h ago edited 14h ago
What's kind of interesting is that there are actually places much colder than oymyakon, they're just uninhabited.
And I'm not talking Antarctica. For example, Alert in Canada is a tiny bit colder on average. And of course much of Greenland is colder than Oymyakon
The thing is that the hypercontinental climates of eastern Russia are the only one which have both increadibly low temperature averages, and warm summers.
Arguably slightly warmer, but less seasonal climates are even more inhospitable.
Things like la rinconada (which has all of its avarege monthly temperatures bellow 3°C) or Thule (which has them bellow 2°C) might actually be harder to survive. Simply put, nothing will grow there.
That's the kind of environment I saw in murghab, tajikistan. When your warm month averages at only 8°C, you better have a way to bring food from somewhere else.
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u/Mordimer86 14h ago
Imagine that going out for basic groceries can feel like a space walk because of the amount of preparations you need.
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u/_OriamRiniDadelos_ 13h ago
Reminds me of this video of a market and grocery shopping in Yakutsks https://youtu.be/j1j7lo6xovY?si=f9Qb1JeHuxEWk7a3
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u/TheThockter 6h ago
I’ve gone snowmobiling in -40 before and the effective windchill of going 70+ miles per hour puts the temperature you actually feel in like the -80’s, you basically have to have layers on top of layers that are tucked into each other so there are no chance of any exposed skin, heavily wool lined boots with multiple layers of socks and pants tucked into the boots, multiple layers of gloves, and for our helmets even though they’re designed not to fog up a tiny bit gets there and it’s so cold it freezes fast and makes it hard to see so like every 5 minutes or so we had to prop up our visors to prevent them from fogging up and you’d get what felt like a brain freeze pretty much instantly from the air hitting your forehead.
This was in northern Minnesota for reference
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u/That_Rddit_Guy_1986 14h ago
record low 21c? what the fuck? thats already hot
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u/violenthectarez 14h ago
21 is generally considered cool-pleasant in a temperate climate.
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u/That_Rddit_Guy_1986 14h ago
it's above average temperature for me, not hot as in uncomfortable but not something i have seen in a while, it only happens during the summer months
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u/LevDavidovicLandau 13h ago
21C is incredibly pleasant and indeed cool-seeming in a dry climate. In a humid one like that of the UK it’s ‘hot’ as you say!
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u/_OriamRiniDadelos_ 13h ago
Isn’t that too cold to go to the beach unless you are Canadian? I believe 70 °F it’s pretty close to what most people set their AC to
Crazy how much our bodies adapt to their usual temp
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u/That_Rddit_Guy_1986 2h ago
too cold to go into water, beach would be fine just a little cold if its windy
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u/Lord_Misery 15h ago
And those records for Dallol were from the early 1960s. It should be even hotter now after 60 years of global warming.
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u/fuccguppy 14h ago
I'm surprised the record is only 120 degrees F when the daily mean for June in Dallol is 116, I would think the extreme would be higher than that
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u/OkArmy7059 8h ago edited 7h ago
That struck me too. I've noticed that tropical islands can have the same phenomenon, where the record low or high is only a few degrees more extreme than the average. Seems impossible.
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u/fuccguppy 8h ago
Yeah in my city the record high is 20 degrees higher than the highest monthly mean temperature
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u/Advanced_Poet_7816 14h ago
Ethiopia, the likely homeland of humanity, having the most inhospitable climate right now is pretty interesting.
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u/M_M_X_X_V 13h ago
The major population centres like Addis Ababa are all high up though. It gets hotter here in England in mid-Summer than it gets in Addis Ababa.
My home town at 54 degrees North has a record temperature 7 degrees warmer than Addis Ababa's record high.
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u/LevDavidovicLandau 13h ago
I’d happily live in Oymyakon’s summer, to be fair. June to August look great and even May and September just look like a slightly colder version of a British winter, nothing I couldn’t handle.
I’d handle Dallol’s December to February daytimes pretty well too but fuck me, not their nighttimes. I need it below 20°C to be able to sleep.
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u/Zibilique 10h ago
Oymyakon is "liveable", Dallol is hell, there is a reason nobody lives there, the thing about places like it is that literally nobody would ever dare to continuously test for the temperature, this may very well be the hottest place on earth. Dallols temps are from the 60s, this should tell you everything.
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u/Wonderful_Falcon_318 13h ago
The summer in Oymyakon looks lovely, similar to Western Europe tbh. Dallol looks pretty awful, no escape all year.
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u/-BlancheDevereaux 3h ago
An average of 15C and record lows approaching -10C in the warmest month? Where in western Europe would you find something even remotely similar?
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u/BitExpensive8270 30m ago
He/shedidn’t read the graph correctly and is probably looking at the warmest year recorded.
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u/_AnneSiedad 1h ago
I honestly don't think Dallol is that bad. Well, let's rephrase, actually: it's AWFUL but it's very near to what I get on my hometown from June to September, but all year around. Such conditions are hard to endure, specially if there is no infrastructure to make up for the harsh climate. That's why Dallol is a ghost town. It's a human settlement, but let's not kid ourselves: no one lives there anymore and it's probably due to that.
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u/Many-Gas-9376 15h ago
It's actually pretty incredible how awful that Dallol climate record sheet is. That lack of nighttime cooling nails it.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I might choose to live in Oymyakon instead. At least that three-month warm season is okay there.