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Parts Of Canada Are Currently Colder Than The South Pole And Mars

The freezing weather is wreaking havoc across the country.
A woman walks through snow on a cold day in Quebec City on Wednesday.
ALICE CHICHE via Getty Images
A woman walks through snow on a cold day in Quebec City on Wednesday.

Best of luck with this cold spell, Canada.

Weather across the country on Dec. 28 had people shivering from coast-to-coast-to-coast, as yet another freezing day in an unusually cold week came to pass.

Ottawa had the dubious honour of being the coldest capital in the world when its overnight temperatures hit -29 C Wednesday night. This made it colder than Mongolia's capital of Ulan Bator, which usually holds the position, according to CBC News.

Most of the country is currently colder than Antarctica, where the temperature hovered at a downright enjoyable -16 C at the Amundsen-Scott Weather Station. St. John's, N.L. was one of the only exceptions at around -5 C. To be fair, though the South Pole is generally considered to be colder than the North Pole, it's currently summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Too bad much of Canada is also colder than the North Pole currently, where the average temperature this week is around -23 C. That's about 6 degrees warmer than it is in Saskatoon and several other places.

The Gale Crater on Mars clocked in at -23 C on Dec. 28, which makes the red planet around the same as temperatures in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Calgary which were all somewhere between -19 and -24 C today, CTV News reported.

People walk down an icy street in Quebec City on Wednesday.
ALICE CHICHE via Getty Images
People walk down an icy street in Quebec City on Wednesday.

If your car needs a tow or boost in Edmonton, because it's so damn cold, you're out of luck. The CAA's wait times as of Thursday are nearly 17 hours for a full tow, 5.5 hours for a light boost or lock out, and they've suspended battery testing and replacements entirely due to severe weather.

Another chilling fact about the weather is that it's cold enough to have broken at least one window, as shown in this tweet by a woman in Northwestern Ontario.

Another fun fact to read while sipping on hot chocolate and burrowing under a mountain of blankets? Most of the world's animals would die if they were currently in Montreal, according to the National Post. Lucky for them, they are not, but we miserable Canadians aren't so lucky, and we can't even hibernate like those stinkin' bears.

Montreal was also so cold Wednesday night that firefighters struggled to fight an overnight blaze because their water kept freezing in their hoses, AFP reported.

A weather wave this long and this cold hasn't happened in a very long time.

"We have to go back in 1993 to see this kind of weather in Ontario and Quebec," Alexandre Parent, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, told the outlet.

So Canadians better bundle up, since frostbite warnings are active across the country and meteorologists say the weather isn't going to ease up any time soon.

CLARIFICATION - Dec. 30, 2017 - This post has been updated to include details on the fact that it's currently summer in the South Pole and that parts of Canada are also colder than the North Pole.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.