Beyond Boundaries: Discovering Earth’s Most Extreme Settlements
For many people who already reside in vulnerable places, the climate catastrophe and the rise in extreme weather occurrences around the world have made life challenging. The biggest obstacles to leading healthy lives include extreme weather conditions including freezing temperatures, pollution, and a lack of resources. However, in many locations, people are willing to face such risks to survive or continue living where their families have done so for many generations.
Let’s have a look at some extreme places where people manage to survive!
Coldest Place – Oymyakon, Sakha Republic Russia
The village of Oymyakon located a two days journey from Yakutsk, is thought to be the world’s coldest continuously inhabited community. 500 courageous people risk temperatures of -50oC on average throughout the winter and only three hours of daylight to live in this icy wilderness.
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A monument in the town plaza honors the place’s record-low temperature, a frigid -71.2°C in 1924. Despite this, summertime highs of 34°C have been recorded. Raw fish is the only food the residents of Oymyakon consume, and ice fishing is one of the region’s main sources of revenue.
Driest Place – Arica, Atacama Desert, Chile
Rain hasn’t dropped in certain areas of the Atacama Desert for 500 years, which is a long time by any standard. Arica, Chile, a nearby city, is the driest place on Earth and receives just 0.761mm of rain annually.
Despite these sobering statistics, the population has increased to over 220,000, mostly as a result of the city’s significance as a port, proximity to the Pan-American Highway, and its strong fruit industries, which are located in the surrounding valleys of Azapa and Lluta.
Most Polluted Place – La Oroya, Peru
With dangerously high levels of arsenic, lead, and sulfur dioxide in the air and acid rain destroying the vegetation in the surrounding areas, life is truly miserable for the city’s 25,000 or so residents. Doe Run Peru, the city’s largest employer, operates a smelting facility at La Oroya where metals including gold, silver, bismuth, and cadmium among others are produced.
The Blacksmith Institute named it one of the world’s most polluted places to live in 2007, but attempts are being undertaken to clean up the area and improve life for the locals.
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Riskiest place – Vanuatu, South Pacific Ocean
Would you like to spend every day avoiding hazardous active volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis? Why not travel to Vanuatu in the Pacific Islands, which the UN’s World Risk Index ranks as the riskiest place to live? According to satellite data, sea levels have been rising in Vanuatu at a rate of roughly 6mm annually since 1993, and climate change is expected to cause an average temperature of 1 degree Celsius by 2030.
And if that weren’t awful enough, the island was slammed by Tropical Cyclone Harold in April 2020, which was the worst to hit it in five years and had winds of up to 250 kph.
Most isolated place – Tristan de Cunha, South Atlantic
246 people are living on this little collection of isolated islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. The lack of a runway large enough for an airplane to land doesn’t assist its remoteness. The only means of transportation is a boat, which requires six days to get from South Africa, which is 2,430 kilometers away.
Most population-dense place – Manila, Philippines
Which location on Earth has the most people crammed into the smallest space is a matter of considerable contention. But the city of Manila is undoubtedly near the top of the list, with a staggering density of residents estimated to be 42,857 people per square km.
Over the past 50 years, a booming port has sparked a rapid expansion of the economy, which has in turn caused population growth, an increase in pollution, and persistent traffic issues. To top it all off, there is a severe housing scarcity in the city, which has increased crowdedness to a great extent.
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Wettest place – Mawsynram, India
The location of the planet’s wettest spot is a matter of some debate. The Guinness Book of Records lists Mawsynram as the location with the highest annual average rainfall, but its neighbor Cherrapunji still maintains the record for the highest monthly and annual rainfall totals. There is no denying, however, that you would have a very tough time getting your laundry dry in any location.
Conclusion
Our planet, the earth has always been a mysterious place to those who are ignorant, especially about the many places that are yet to be discovered. We live in a small corner of such a huge globe that it is often easy to forget that a significant number of the population is out there living in extreme conditions. Whether it be the hottest, the coldest, the most isolated, the most populated, etc. people are surviving amidst all of it.
Our only hope as people belonging to this one home is that this rat race of politico-economical gain and factors like climate change don’t further deplete the conditions of such areas making it further difficult for its inhabitants.
