What is the coldest city in the world?

In a letter Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton wrote to his friend Kitty Pogson, a London socialite, during his expedition in September 1902, he describes the extreme cold and its catastrophic effects on the crew.

"We unfortunately lost one of our men in a very bad blizzard by his falling over an ice cliff, and we nearly lost one of the lieutenants and three more men," Shackleton wrote. "The weather is pretty cold now, the lowest temperature having been -62 Fahrenheit [minus 52.2 degrees Celsius]."

Nowadays, only a few thousand people — mainly scientists — visit Antarctica every year. Although Antarctica is the coldest continent, city dwellers on other parts of the globe routinely weather temperatures that are just as frigid. So what is the coldest city in the world?

Related: What's the coldest place in the universe?

That accolade belongs to the Russian city of Yakutsk. Located in Siberia, one of the world's coldest and most sparsely populated regions, Yakutsk is home to around 336,200 people, many of whom work for Alrosa, a company that runs a diamond mine in the city.

Temperatures in Yakutsk have reached minus 76 F (minus 60 C). Some residents insist they have experienced much colder days, but they have been unable to verify it because "the thermometer only reads down as far as -63 C [minus 81.4 F]," according to an interview by the BBC.

 Yakutsk has an average annual temperature of 18.5 F (minus 7.5 C), according to Climate-Data.org, which pulls its data from the intergovernmental organization the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Average temperatures in Yakutsk are below 32 F (0 C) for six months of the year, with mercury levels reaching a maximum of around 68 F (20 C) in July.