Stunning Subzero Temperatures In Russia Freeze Eyelashes, Kill Two

The city known for being one of the coldest in the world saw an extreme over the weekend when the temperature dipped well into the negatives. Yakutsk, the city in Russia along the Lena River, is currently going through quite the cold snap.

Over the weekend the temperature reached -56 degrees Celsius, in the city along the river, that’s about -68.8 degrees Fahrenheit. In other parts of the Yakutia region the temperature dropped even lower, to -67 degrees Celsius, or -88.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the Associated Press reported.

The cold caused two casualties over the weekend when two men tried to walk through the unrelenting cold after their car broke down, three other people with them survived though thanks to the warmer clothes they were wearing, the AP reported.

Extremely cold temperatures or prolonged exposure to the cold can cause the body’s temperature to drop and can result in hypothermia, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Hypothermia occurs when the body loses heat faster than it can produce it and the body’s temperature lowers.

Most of the people in the region are used to the freezing temperatures and were even playing around in the extreme weather. Some of the photos and videos ended up on Twitter. One resident of the city took the opportunity to boil water and toss it out into the cold to see it immediately turn to ice crystals.

It was even so cold that eyelashes were freezing and turning white in the cold, according to The Siberian Times. While the frozen eyelashes look pretty, the cold is actually potentially dangerous for the eyes. Extreme cold can cause eye pain, loss of vision, blurred vision, and even a frozen cornea in severe cases, according to the Vision Eye Institute.

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