Living in cold extremes - Tuva

A short film from Tuva (Southern Siberia) showing the daily winter life of semi-nomadic herders adapted to extreme cold. Winter temperatures in Tuva regularly reach -30°C to -40°C. The herders in the film live in traditional yurts, without central heating or grid infrastructure, and carry out daily activities across these temperatures — walking with livestock for hours, working outdoors, and moving between the yurt and the surrounding landscape. Their physiological adaptation to sustained cold exposure challenges standard assumptions about human thermal comfort and about what building environments should optimize for. The film is not a documentation of the research itself, but of the world in which the research took place — the population, the landscape, and the conditions that motivated the study.

Filming: Mergen Lyundup and Vladimir Mongush, 2021. Concept and editing by Dolaana Khovalyg. Music composed and performed by Radik Tyulyush, 2026. Research by Dolaana Khovalyg, Arnab Chatterjee, Adam Sellers, and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt (EPFL & Maastricht University). 

Related publications:

• Khovalyg et al. (2023), Build. Environ. — DOI:10.1016/j.buildenv.2023.11
• Sellers et al. (2023), Am. J. Hum. Biol. — DOI:10.1002/ajhb.23933
• Sellers et al. (2022),Sci. Rep. — DOI:10.1038/s41598-022-23975-3

More on ICE Lab: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/ice/beyond-the-comfort-envelope/