The coldest place on Earth is the Antarctic Plateau, an area of Antarctica around the South Pole that has an altitude of around 3000 meters. The lowest temperature ever recorded was 129F, at the Russian base on the Antarctic Plateau Vostok Station.

The high altitude of the Plateau is one factor in it being the coldest place on Earth. The main factor is its location. Surface temperature depends on the amount of incident solar radiation that falls on a location. The angle at which sunlight reaches the Earth, and hence the amount of incident radiation in a particular place, depends on latitude. South of 66.5S in the Antarctic winter, no sunlight reaches the surface.

As the amount of sunlight reaching the surface at the Antarctic Plateau decreases rapidly at the end of the summer, so does the temperature. The temperature then stays approximately constant until the sun comes back at the end of the winter, at which point it starts to climb rapidly. This is called a Coreless Winter in other places on Earth there is a winter month that is the coldest, but on the Antarctic Plateau this is not the case.

At the Antarctic Plateau, the summers are very short and the winters are long and cold. However, Antarctica is a large continent and the weather is not the same throughout. At the coast, the ocean acts as a heat source and keeps the temperatures much milder.

The average summer temperature at the South Pole (on the Antarctic Plateau) is around -28C, dropping much lower in the winter as we have seen. On the coast, the average summer temperature is -2C, dropping to between -10 and -15C in the winter.

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