founded an ostrog in 1638, southwest of the modern town. The ostrog's name "Verkhoyansky", roughly translating from Russian as the town on the Upper Yana, derived from its geographical location on the upper reaches of the Yana River. In 1775, it was moved to the left bank of the Yana River to facilitate tax collection. It was granted town status in 1817. Between the 1860s and 1917, the town was a place of political exile, with some of the more prominent exiles including the Polish writerWacław Sieroszewski, as well as Bolshevik revolutionaries Ivan Babushkin and Viktor Nogin.
There is a river port, an airport, a fur-collecting depot, and the center of a reindeer-raising area. It is also home to the
Geography
Climate
Verkhoyansk is notable chiefly for its exceptionally low winter temperatures and some of the greatest temperature differences on Earth between summer and winter. Average monthly temperatures range from in January to in July. Mean monthly temperatures are below freezing from October through April and exceed from June through August, with the intervening months of May and September constituting very short transitional seasons. Despite being located within the Arctic Circle, Verkhoyansk has an extreme subarctic climate dominated much of the year by high pressure. This has the effect of cutting off the region from warming influences in winter and together with a lack of cloud cover leads to extensive heat losses during the cooler months. Verkhoyansk is one of the places considered the northern Pole of Cold, the other being Oymyakon, located 629 km away by air. The lowest temperature recorded there, in February 1892, was, recorded on February 5and 7, although on 6 February 1933, the temperature at Oymyakon reached, just barely above Verkhoyansk's record. Only Antarctica has recorded lower temperatures than Oymyakon or Verkhoyansk: the lowest directly recorded temperature at ground level is, recorded at the Vostok Station in Antarctica on 21 July 1983., and a temperature of was recorded via satellite observations at the East Antarctic Plateau in Antarctica on 10 August 2010. In this area, temperature inversions consistently form in winter due to the extremely cold and dense air of the Siberian High pooling in deep hollows, so that temperatures increase rather than decrease with higher altitude. In Verkhoyansk it sometimes happens that the average minimum temperatures for January, February, and December are below. Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk are the only two permanently populated places in the world that have recorded temperatures below every day of January. In June, July, and August, daytime temperatures over are not uncommon. The warmest month on record is July 2001, at. The average annual temperature for Verkhoyansk is. On 20 June 2020, Verkhoyansk recorded a temperature of, yielding a temperature range of based on reliable records, which is the greatest temperature range in the world. It was also the highest temperature above the Arctic Circle ever recorded. Oymyakon, Yakutsk, Delyankir and Fort Vermilion in Canada are the only other places in the world with a temperature range higher than. Verkhoyansk has never recorded a temperature above freezing between November 10 and March 14. Verkhoyansk has a dry climate with little rainfall or snowfall: the average annual precipitation is. Although no month can be described as truly wet, there are strong seasonal differences in precipitation, with the summer being much wetter than the winter. Winter precipitation is extremely light, largely because of the dominance of high pressure at this time of year.
