Seymour Simon - Seymour Simons Extreme Earth Records

To Liz Nealon with love. My companion, collaborator, and wife who helped create this book. S.S

When I was in second grade in an elementary school in the Bronx, I wrote my first book, Space Monsters, about crossing the galaxy to discover the strange life-forms found on distant planets. I even drew "space monsters" for my fellow classmates! Of course, my book was fiction and I used my imagination, but now my books are about real things. Seymour Simon's Extreme Earth Records is non-fiction, based in fact, but you can still use your own imagination! As you're reading I hope you're imagining what it would be like to experience these extremes. You don't have to travel to the farthest reaches of our galaxy for adventure! You can find it right here in your own backyard: Earth.

I'm just as excited writing this book as I was writing fiction about monsters on distant planets in second grade. Perhaps more so, because there is something thrilling about knowing that what you read about is real! I think you'll agree. So come along with me and let's explore the outer limits of our own planet in Seymour Simon's Extreme Earth Records.

Seymour Simon

During this time you suffer from pounding headaches, painful earaches, and constant nosebleeds. Your eyes twitch and you vomita lot. You find yourself short of breath and feel as if you're suffocating due to the lack of oxygen. You can't sleep because of all your discomforts. Your blood pressure rises and you have painful cramps in your arms and legs. Sounds like a perfect vacation from school, doesn't it?

Vostok Station is a lonely, windblown outpost 621 miles (1,000 kilo-meters) from the South Pole. It holds the record for the lowest recorded temperature on Earth, -128.6F (-89.2C), recorded in July 1983. Twice a year, tractor-train (a train of tractor trucks) expeditions take as long as a month to crawl dangerously over the cracked, icy landscape, carrying food and supplies to about a dozen Russian, American, and French scientists who live there conducting a variety of experiments.

Scientists are drilling down through thick layers of ice beneath Vostok Research Station, the coldest place on Earth. The spinning drills have reached down to gigantic Lake Vostok, which lies more than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) deep inside the icy glacier. The core of ice removed from the drilling dates back to more than 420,000 years ago, a time when saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths roamed the earth. The drilling stops just short of the waters in the lake. Scientists are trying to keep the unseen lake waters pure and uncontaminated by bacteria the drills carry from the surface. Scientists study the tubes of ice to learn more about the kinds of microbial life that may have existed in the waters, despite the high pressure, constant cold, and lack of sunlight. What kinds of life can live in the cold lake waters inside an icy glacier is a scientific mystery that remains to be solved.

Of course, it is not always that cold in Vostok, but it is always very cold. The high temperature even in the "warmer months" of the Antarctic summer is often a bone-chilling -60F (-51C). There is no sign of animal life outside the station, except for the occasional skua birdit's too cold for living things in the "South Pole of Cold."

Water freezes at 32 F (0C). Ice cream needs to be stored at approximately -10 F (-23C) to remain solid. At -50 F (-45C), you can get frostbite on your unprotected fingers or nose within a few minutes. The coldest temperature ever recorded in the United States was -80 F (-62C), in Alaska.

Antarctica was once warm enough for many kinds of plants and animals to live. But not today, and not down deep inside a glacier. Since Antarctica froze over, Lake Vostok has been completely sealed from outside air and sunlight. Not a single ray of light has reached the cold waters in hundreds of thousands of years. Yet scientists think that some kinds of life can live even in such a dark place. If any life is able to survive in Lake Vostok, it may be similar to the life that might exist in the ice-covered oceans on one of Jupiter's moons, Europa, and one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus. We won't know for sure unless spacecraft or robots from Earth touch down on Europa or Enceladus to search their hidden oceans for life. But the clues to the life on distant moons may lie in a frozen lake in Antarctica.

The record-breaking highest temperature in North America of 134F (57C) was recorded on July 10, 1913, at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California.

The creek is well named because it feels like a furnace in the summer. The population of the village of Furnace Creek is only twenty-four people, according to the latest census. Why? Probably because no one wants to live in that heat!

Ordinary summer heat is bad in the desert lands of the Southwest United States, but in Death Valley it really sizzles from June through August. Winds from surrounding mountain ranges blow hot, dry air thousands of feet down into the long, narrow valley called Death. Death Valley's lowest point is 282 feet (86 meters) below sea level. As air moves downhill, it heats up and becomes 5.5F hotter for every drop of 1,000 feet (or 10C per kilometer drop). And because of the high elevation of the nearby Sierra Nevada mountain range, the air is warmed 20F to 30F (11C to 17C) by the time it reaches the valley floor, making the already hot air feel like the inside of an oven.