Going to Extremes (British TV series)
British Television Programme

Going to Extremes and Surviving Extremes are television programmes made for Channel 4 by Nick Middleton. In each episode of the two series, Middleton visited an extreme area of the world to find out how people have adapted to life there.
Both Going to Extremes and Surviving Extremes were accompanied by books of the same name, except in the USA where the latter was titled Extremes: Surviving the World's Harshest Environments.
There was also a third series, titled Going to Extremes: The Silk Routes.
Going to Extremes
In this series, Middleton visited the coldest, hottest, driest and wettest permanent settlements in the world.
Coldest
Oymyakon in Siberia, where the average winter temperature is −47 °F (− 44 °C).
Driest
Arica in Chile, where there had been fourteen consecutive years without rain. Fog is the only local source of water.
Wettest
Mawsynram in India, where average annual rainfall is 14 meters, falling within a four-month period in the monsoon season. The rainfall is approximately equal to that of its neighbor Cherrapunji.
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This entry incorporates text from “Going to Extremes (British TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.