The number of casualties from cold exposure continues to rise as most of Europe experiences freezing temperatures. Dozens of people have been reported dead across the continent - many of them rough sleepers. Among the casualties was a man, 75, in the Netherlands, who fell through the ice while skating on Wednesday morning. He was pronounced dead in hospital.
Even thermometers can't keep up with the plunging temperatures in Russia's remote Yakutia region, which hit minus 67 degrees Celsius (minus 88.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas on Tuesday. In Yakutia, a region of 1 million people about 5,300 kilometers east of Moscow, students routinely go to school even in minus 40 degrees. But school was canceled on Tuesday throughout the region and police ordered parents to keep their children inside.
Australia experienced its third-warmest year on record in 2017, according to the nation's Bureau of Meteorology. The national mean temperature of 22.75C was almost 1C higher than a 1961-1990 baseline, its annual report revealed. Only 2005 and 2013 were warmer, based on records kept for about a century.
The aftermath of a frigid “bomb cyclone” and polar vortex left much of the northeastern US and Canada frigid on Friday night. Wind chills in one part of the state of New Hampshire were forecast to hit negative 50 degrees Celsius, according to forecasters. New York Times reporters who were sent to Mount Washington in that state said the wind “steals your breath and freezes your eyelashes.”