Coldest city in the world – in pictures

A woman covers her face to protect it from the biting -53C weather in Yakutsk's central square.

A woman returns home from university. While most of the city's population are indigenous Yakutian, many ethnic Russians and Ukrainians have moved to Yakutsk.

A frost-encrusted house in the city centre.

Frozen summer shoes hang in a shed.

A Yakutian woman pictured in the city centre. The steam from factories, cars and even people creates a thick fog in winter which lingers through the coldest weeks.

'The Road of Bones' - aka the highway built with Gulag labour, literally. Here, prisoners who died at work were interred into the fabric of Stalin's Kolyma Highway. Without a rail link to the city, the highway is the only major land route into and out of Yakutsk.

A local woman enters Preobrazhensky cathedral in a swirl of freezing mist.

A no-nonsense guard dog in the city suburbs. Photographs: Amos Chapple