Transcription
Of all the major cities in the world with uh questionable locations, there's got to be one of them that's the most questionable of all. And I'd argue that it's probably this place in the middle of Siberia.
Here in the depths of winter, the average low temperature will hover around -42° C. An entire week can pass by where it never gets above -40 at all. That's cold enough that if you dare to venture outside, your exposed fingers can receive frostbite damage in as little as 3 to 7 minutes, while your exposed nose and cheeks can receive frostbite damage between 5 and 8 minutes.
Even if the rest of your body is completely bundled up appropriately, engine oil used in cars can begin to thicken like glue and even freeze at these kinds of temperatures. Fuel lines will freeze, batteries will die, tires will split open, and even metal can become brittle and crack when you hit it, which leads to residents of this city usually running their car engines for hours overnight during the winter, which leaves parking lots looking like huge fields of idling vehicles. Groceries bought at the store might freeze solid by the time you get back home. And it's so brutally cold that fish for sale in markets can simply be left outside on display for days or even weeks at a time because the ambient temperature outside is going to be colder than any freezer and it'll preserve them all the same.
This extreme city's name is Yakutsk, a place that's probably most well-known to Westerners as a space on the board game Risk. But with a surprisingly large population of more than 370,000 people today in the real world, it is far from your typical small Arctic outpost. There is no bigger settlement that could be found in any direction for thousands of kilometers. Yakutsk is also notably the largest city in the world that's ever been founded within the permafrost zone. The regions in the northern hemisphere where the soil remains permanently frozen year-round and have remained frozen for thousands of years and where conducting agriculture, growing your own food, and supporting a large population are all very, very difficult.
And so, what's even stranger then is the density of the population in Yakutsk relative to its overall region. The city is the capital of Russia's Sakha region. The largest country subdivision in the world that's roughly twice the size of Alaska. Placed over the United States, Sakha is so huge that it would encompass basically the entire eastern half of the country. And yet, across this entire huge stretch of territory lives fewer than 1 million people today. Nearly 40% of whom all just live within the capital city of Yakutsk. Surrounded by a hinterland that can hardly support any agriculture at all. Yakutsk is a genuinely big city and a thriving regional capital complete with universities, theaters, shopping malls, and high-rise apartments that all exist in this brutal environment that makes it by far the coldest major city on the planet.
The coldest temperature ever recorded in Yakutsk during the winter is about -64° C. An almost unbelievable sensation if you've never experienced it. That's even colder than the surface of Mars gets during some seasons. In the same general area where Yakutsk is located, the absolute lowest temperatures ever recorded on our planet have been measured anywhere outside of Antarctica and Greenland. And yet, neither of those places have a metropolis home to hundreds of thousands of residents. Yakutsk is thus a truly bizarre anomaly in the world of human geography, and for many more reasons than just its cold environment.
And that begs the ultimate question: Why does a big city of this significant a size even exist at all within an environment that is so objectively hostile to human life? And what sort of unique challenges does living and working in the world's coldest city entail for your everyday person there?
The area around modern-day Yakutsk has been inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years, but was always extremely remote and sparsely populated for basically all of history until relatively modern times because of the climate. It's basically like a late-game settlement in one of the Sid Meier's Civilization games that you found just in order to gain access to the area's resources. The ethnic Yakut people, who refer to themselves as the Sakha, migrated into the area around Yakutsk sometime around the 13th and 14th centuries from the northern shores of Lake Baikal further to the south after they were displaced by the expanding Mongols. A Turkic people, the Yakuts are the northernmost of all the world's Turkic ethnic groups today, and their language is closely related to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages in Central Asia.
Beginning in the mid-16th century, the Russian state began its centuries of expansion across Siberia in the hunt for valuable resources like fur, which was used as both a form of currency and a product that could be exported. In 1632, Russian explorers at the frontier of their expanding empire first entered into the heartland of the Sakha deep in Siberia, where they founded a small fort that would eventually become the modern metropolis of Yakutsk. By the 1640s, the Russians had managed to fully subjugate the Sakha people. At this early point in the settlement's history, the fort of Yakutsk was utilized as a place to receive tribute paid in furs from the local Sakha and other peoples in the area in exchange for the Russians generally leaving them alone to their own affairs. At the time, nobody could have possibly envisioned that this remote colonial outpost dedicated to harvesting fur would eventually become a major metropolis in the future.
But Yakutsk did have at least one major geographic advantage going for it that would later help out its growth potential: its location along the Lena River. The Lena is a very, very significant global river system. It's actually the 11th longest river in the world, and it stretches for thousands of kilometers from its source at Lake Baikal in the south to its delta in the Arctic Ocean in the north, with tributaries that fan out all across the region. And Yakutsk was well-positioned along the Lena River to control this whole system. And during the summer season, the river is actually perfectly navigable for a huge length of 3,540 km, making it a great river transportation network during the summer. The key phrase, of course, is "during the summer," because this navigability only lasts for about 70 to 125 days out of the year, depending on the exact location. And that's the only time that the Lena remains navigable because for more than 2/3 of the rest of the year, the whole river is either frozen solid or it's full of little ice floes that make any and all navigation across it impossible.
Nonetheless, as a seasonally useful inland port, Yakutsk was an ideal frontier location to receive furs to ship upstream to Lena, down towards Lake Baikal, where from there it was easier to export overland further towards the core in European Russia, especially after the later advent of the Trans-Siberian Railway. For centuries until the mid-1800s, the Sakha region was basically entirely exploited by the Russians as a resource colony that almost completely focused on fur because the soil in the region was largely covered by permafrost. Relying on agriculture to sustain the economy around the settlement was never going to be a successful endeavor. And that also kept the region's population and labor force low since they couldn't really grow their own food supply, limiting the region's economic potential beyond resource exploitation even further.
By the end of the 19th century, Yakutsk was basically still just a small frontier town that hardly anyone had ever heard of, that recorded a population of only about 6,500 people in the 1897 Russian Empire census, with the overwhelming majority of ethnic Russians in the town still involved in the fur trade. But then, across the 20th century, everything would begin rapidly changing for the town.
After the Soviet Union was established in 1922, the territory of Sakha was reorganized into the Yakut Autonomous SSR, basically a semi-autonomous territory of the Russian SSR, a status that had largely been inherited within Russia after the Soviet collapse in the 1990s. And the very next year afterwards, in 1923, the new modern era of Yakutsk finally began when gold was discovered by Soviet geologists in the south of the Sakha region. Within only two years from then, by 1925, more than 13,000 ethnic Slavs from Russia and Ukraine had flooded into the territory in the search for gold and fortune. The Sakha territory's gold rush had begun, and it would never be the same ever again.
The Soviet government under Stalin concluded that the amount of voluntary labor present in Sakha who were actually willing to mine for gold was far too insufficient to actually harvest the amount of gold they wanted. So, they began bringing in huge numbers of involuntary labor instead through the infamous Gulag system. Across Stalin's reign, around 100 different camps, prisons, and penal colonies were established in the Gulag system all across the Sakha territory, and at least 50,000 prisoners were brought into them who were primarily used for labor in the gold mines.
In a sense, this was only a dramatic continuation of the old Tsarist policies in Siberia, which had long treated Yakutsk and the Sakha territory specifically as effectively a prison without any walls. In addition to its use as a resource colony, political dissidents who were exiled to the Sakha territory didn't need to be kept under constant surveillance or even housed in prisons because where would they actually go? Nothing else existed for thousands of kilometers in any direction. And the odds of survival out there alone in the brutal wilderness and climate were effectively zero, making its location perfect as a dumping ground for people who were politically or socially undesirable by both the Tsarist and later Soviet regimes alike.
All of this during the Stalinist era made the population of both Yakutsk and the Sakha territory more broadly explode. Between 1926 and 1959, the population of Yakutsk, the city, expanded by more than seven times over from only around 10,000 people to more than 70,000. While the ethnic Yakuts, or Sakha, themselves were diluted from more than 80% of the overall territory's population in 1926 to less than half of the population by 1959, due to the influx of all of the Russians and Ukrainians from the European part of the Soviet Union.
And as it turned out, gold was far from the only valuable resource to be found in the area, and it wouldn't even be the most valuable resource either. As early as the 1930s, Soviet geologists were commenting on the similar nature of the geography found in Siberia to South Africa, which led to a lot of speculation that Siberia probably had rich diamond deposits just like South Africa had. After the Second World War momentarily interrupted all of the exploration efforts for them, the first rough diamond in the Sakha region was finally discovered by Soviet geologists in 1949. And then 5 years later in 1954, shortly after Stalin's death, they hit the motherlode in a rich kimberlite pipe in Sakha that they called Zarnitsa. And as it soon turned out from there, the Sakha territory is actually the most diamond-rich area in the world that's ever been discovered anywhere outside of southern Africa.
And this is what truly caused the even more rapid explosion in the territory's population across the second half of the 20th century, as even more Russians and Ukrainians began migrating in in search of diamond fortune. By the end of the 20th century, the Sakha territory was producing as much as 25% of the world's entire supply of diamonds, and entire cities were built up from scratch around all of the various mines that were built using pre-fabricated housing and staffed with workforces that were largely imported from the European part. During the Soviet era, the salary that a worker could earn in the diamond mines in Sakha were roughly four times greater than the Soviet average, with generous bonuses paid on top, which was more than enough to attract tens of thousands of new people to move to the territory despite its brutal climate and working and living conditions.
And all of this led to the rise in population and development of Sakha's capital, Yakutsk, where the big diamond and gold mining operations all began establishing their regional offices and headquarters at. Since the 1960s, every single year, more than $1 billion worth of diamonds have been mined up from the Sakha territory. And by the end of the 1980s, diamond and gold mining, along with smaller tin and coal mining operations, were collectively bringing about $4 billion into the Soviet treasury every year. A fortune that has led to the increasingly rapid development of the regional capital at Yakutsk.
Between 1959 and 1989, roughly from when the diamond industry just started getting going to just before the Soviet Union's collapse, the population of Yakutsk more than doubled again from 74,000 people to more than 186,000 people, complete with high-rise apartments, museums, factories, and airports. Meaning that by the twilight years of the Soviet era, Yakutsk had already become a fairly large city from basically nothing, almost entirely because of the emergence of the diamond and gold mining industries in the region.
The biggest symbol of Soviet and Russian mining operations that emerged in the Sakha territory is the Mir open-pit mine. Currently the fourth deepest open-pit mine globally and one of the largest man-made holes on the planet, that's 525 m deep and more than a full kilometer wide. This hole is so big that helicopters have been restricted from flying over it because of the turbulent air currents that the hole generates above it.
In their search for even more valuable minerals in the territory, the Soviets also conducted a series of underground nuclear explosions across the Sakha territory as well that continue to plague the region's environment to this day. Over a period of about 14 years between 1974 and 1988, the Soviets are known to have conducted at least 12 of these underground nuclear explosions in the Sakha territory that attempted to either use their seismic waves to locate further minerals or to utilize their explosive power to dig out mines in place of conventional explosives. But in the end, all they really did was result in radioactive contamination of the territory's soil and aquifers that have made life even more difficult than it already was naturally.
And of course, the natural environment around Yakutsk is absolutely brutal. And that has always made developing a city here very unique and challenging. There are many natural factors that combine to make the area around Yakutsk the coldest place on the planet anywhere outside of Antarctica and Greenland. The city itself is located deep within the Eurasian continent, thousands of kilometers away from any nearby ocean. Oceans generally moderate temperatures, but Yakutsk doesn't get to experience that. And ironically, the climate 1,000 km away further to the north on the coastline of the Arctic Ocean is even milder than it is down in Yakutsk, with average January temperatures in the north of around -20° C compared to -40° C further to the south inland in Yakutsk.
The Siberian High, the strongest high-pressure weather system in the northern hemisphere, always brings in a massive amount of extremely cold, dry air from the Arctic that gets trapped inland over central Siberia every winter between September and April that significantly affects the climate around Yakutsk as well. Exacerbated by the omnipresent snow-covered taiga and plains that reflect sunlight that further helps to maintain the extremely low temperatures. The result is that weeks at a time in Yakutsk can go without ever rising above -40 degrees C in the winter. The coldest temperature ever recorded in the city is an almost unbelievable -64° C, while the temperature has never been recorded over freezing in the city once between November 10th and March 14th.
Winters are long, dark, and ruthless in Yakutsk. But summers are also bizarrely very hot and unforgiving as well. In the summer, the temperature in Yakutsk can soar to as high as 41° C, or more than 100° Fahrenheit. Which means Yakutsk also experiences by far the wildest temperature variation of any major city throughout the year of more than 100° C difference between the winter lows of -60 and summer highs of positive 40. And even though the winters are brutally cold, the area around Yakutsk gets absolutely infested with plagues of insects and mosquitoes during the hot summers anyway. The surrounding taiga wetlands and floodplains of the Lena River all create massive areas of standing water after the snows melt. And since the ground is underlain by permafrost, the water doesn't drain well and forms countless stagnant pools for mosquitoes to breed in. So, while the winters kill most of the insects here, huge numbers of them always hatch again in an explosive growth during the short, hot summers to the point where the mosquito swarms in this region are considered among the very worst in the world during the summer that can cover your exposed skin within seconds when you're out of the city and the surrounding countryside.
So, as you can probably imagine, building up the modern-day city of Yakutsk in this ridiculous environment that today is somehow nearing a population of 400,000 people has been very difficult for any number of reasons that makes it one of the most extreme and fascinating human settlements ever created. And because it's located in the permafrost region where the soil below the ground remains permanently frozen throughout the year up to 300 m deep, you might think that that would allow for buildings to have stable foundations. But it's actually quite the opposite. Heat produced by buildings placed on concrete foundations directly on the ground will seep through into the permafrost beneath the building and melt it, causing the soil below to turn to mud and shift, which causes the foundation above to crack and the building further above to sag and eventually to sink and collapse. Thus, most houses and structures in the city are built on top of stilts that are drilled up to 10 m deep into the ground or concrete piles instead, in order to avoid this.
All of the usual critical infrastructure in a big city like wires and pipes that are hidden out of sight underground are exposed above the surface for all to see in Yakutsk instead because burying them underground would melt the permafrost as well. And as the world continues warming in the 21st century, the Arctic is warming at roughly twice the rate of the rest of the world, which is increasingly causing the permafrost beneath Yakutsk to melt and warp the structures above it. Anyway, sidewalks in the city shift and warp as a result, making them feel like walking over speed bumps. Buildings are sagging and sinking anyway, and Yakutsk is slowly but surely collapsing despite all of their best previous engineering efforts.
All of this gives Yakutsk an unusual, industrial, almost cyberpunk sort of ambiance, made even more severe by the omnipresent ice fog that envelops the city every winter. Fog doesn't usually exist in environments that have temperatures so far below freezing. But it does in Yakutsk because it gets so unfathomably cold during the winter that warm air generated by all of the buildings, cars, machinery, and even people cannot possibly rise and instantly freezes instead, leaving behind a frozen cloud that hovers above the streets all throughout the winter. It can get so cold during the winters that moisture from your breath will condense and freeze and form frost on your eyebrows and eyelashes within minutes of you stepping outside if you're unprepared for it.
Cars used in the city usually only last for a couple of years before they succumb to the elements. And they have to be left running almost continually throughout the winter in order to prevent their batteries from dying or their fuel from freezing and turning into slushy glue. Well, even EVs will lose as much as 40 to 60% of their usual advertised ranges in the wintertime.
Even just getting yourself into or out of Yakutsk, even in the modern 21st century, is extremely difficult and expensive because of its climate and its sheer geographic isolation. And it's probably one of the most difficult large cities in the entire world to actually visit or leave. The easiest way is, of course, just to fly. And flights to and from Moscow or St. Petersburg usually only take about 6 or 7 hours, but delays and diversions throughout the winter are common because of visibility issues due to all of the fog and occasionally due to when the temperature gets low enough to even freeze jet fuel.
Driving is way, way more difficult and interesting, though, because technically speaking, the city still isn't even connected to any of the rest of the outside world by road, making it the largest city on the entire Eurasian continent that isn't actually connected to anywhere else directly by road. Historically, until only about a decade ago, Yakutsk was only tenuously connected to the rest of Russia by road via the Lena Highway, which runs all the way up to nearby Yakutsk and beyond from the main N58 highway across the south that roughly follows the route to the Trans-Siberian Railway. Until 2014, though, most of the Lena Highway was unpaved, which meant that during the snowmelt and rainy season between May and June, large sections of the highway would transform into deep, muddy quagmires that would make it impassable for weeks at a time, making it impossible to drive to or from Yakutsk for large stretches of time.
Even since the whole length of the Lena Highway was finally finished being paved in 2014, the highway still doesn't technically reach all the way into the city of Yakutsk itself. Because the highway runs parallel to the east bank of the Lena River, and Yakutsk exists over on the opposite west bank of the river, and still to date there's never been a single bridge built anywhere over the whole length of the river.
During the long winter, while the cold temperatures are brutal and hostile to human life, they also make transportation to and from Yakutsk easier because they result in the Lena River freezing solid for nearly the entire season, which enables cars, trucks, and people to simply travel across the river as if it were all a solid highway, providing a critical overland link to the rest of Russia. In the summer season, when the temperatures are much warmer and the river is liquid and flowing, ferry services are offered across the Lena that enable continued transportation over to the highway. But in between the summer and winter, and the shoulder seasons of the spring and fall, transportation across the river becomes almost impossible or at the very least highly risky because the ice across the river is either very thin and can't support the weight of vehicles, or it gets broken up into a bazillion little ice floes that make navigation impossible. Yakutsk still basically becomes a logistical island in Eurasia during these short shoulder seasons.
And even in the summer, the ferries that operate across the river aren't enough to satisfy the flow of all of the passengers, fuel, and essential goods the need to get to and from the city, and thus they're very expensive to take for the average resident of the city. Crossing the river on a ferry one-way over to the other side during the summer can cost as much as 15% of the median monthly wage in Yakutsk, and it usually takes hours of time in long waiting queues, which leads to some people just deciding to risk their lives by driving over the thin ice of the river before and after the summer or to cross it on foot instead, which inevitably leads to stories of cars sinking and people dying after crashing through the ice nearly every year.
Supplies, including food, are still overwhelmingly transported into Yakutsk from elsewhere. Either by river barges that can reach it during the summer, or by expensive tractor trains and trucks that can reach it during the winter, which makes the price of goods within the city significantly higher than you'd probably otherwise expect, and which makes living there fairly expensive despite the horrendous climate.
To try and solve all of these issues and to finally permanently connect Yakutsk to the rest of the outside world, Russian authorities have discussed building a bridge over the Lena River between Yakutsk and the highway for decades, but it's still never been managed. Any bridge over the Lena River would have to cope with extreme environmental challenges. It would need to handle -60° C temperatures in the winter and +40° C temperatures in the summer, while also being able to withstand ice flows during the spring season. This makes designing and building the bridge more expensive than other bridges in less extreme environments otherwise would be. While frequent geopolitical shocks to Russia have kept delaying it as well.
Initial discussions on building the bridge in the 1980s were cancelled after the Soviet Union's chaotic collapse. Later discussions on building the bridge that reemerged again in 2012 were similarly cancelled after Russia invaded Ukraine two years later in 2014 and annexed Crimea, which then led to Russian federal funding being diverted to building the Crimean Bridge from the Russian mainland instead. Then, when discussions on building the bridge were revived for a third time in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began the very next year. And then Russia's greater invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a torrent of international financial sanctions that complicated the project yet again.
Finally, beginning in 2024, the Russian government actually did initiate the process of building the bridge, but it also initially projected that the cost of the bridge would only come out to about $855 million to finish. Since then, though, the estimated cost of building it has dramatically ballooned by nearly double to around $1.7 billion instead, while the federal government has failed to provide any extra funding as it continues to pour most of its spare money into the ongoing war in Ukraine. So, it's pretty unclear at this point when or even if the bridge will ever actually be finished, meaning that Yakutsk will likely continue remaining a logistical island for the foreseeable future. A fascinating human city that spits in the face of most common sense, much like it has been doing for centuries now.
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