It starts like this: I’d like to take you back to the Russian winter of 1941-42: a bitter winter, one of the coldest of the 20th Century. Imagine what it was like for the people of Leningrad ...

That’s how he ended up in Yakutsk, Russia ... winter temperatures regularly fall to -40°F, he says—and the lowest ever recorded was a staggering -83°F. See more pictures of the coldest ...