The world’s ‘worst city’ where human bones lay on the streets and temperatures drop to -50

Russia is home to one of the most polluted cities in the world, where life expectancy is shorter than the national average by as much as ten years.

Norilsk lies inside the Artic Circle, some 1,800 miles from ‘s capital city, Moscow.

The city is extremely remote and can only be accessed by plane or during the summer by taking a boat along the .

The winters are harsh with temperatures plunging to as low as -50C in January and rising to a high of just 9C in the summer.

During the winter, the residents are forced to live in pitch darkness for 45 days of the year, as the sun never rises.

The city has long been recognised by environmentalists and even the Russian government as one of the most polluted places on Earth.

It has even been branded the world’s “most depressing city.”

is the main employer for the city’s 176,000 residents and is the world’s biggest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel used in electric cars.

It is also a top producer of platinum, cobalt and copper.

Yet the plant produces annual pollution equivalent to that of the whole of , which has carved a barren landscape of dead and dying trees out of the taiga, one of the world’s largest carbon sinks.

Its wastewater has turned glacial rivers red and its smokestacks belch out the worst sulphur dioxide pollution in the world.

Life expectancy is just 60 years, some ten years less than the average.

Respiratory disease and skin problems hit many inhabitants hard, especially children.

And medical studies have shown that the risk of cancer is also double the rest of country.

Built as a resource colony by prisoners in the Soviet Gulag, Norilsk outlasted communism and embraced capitalism.

An estimated 16,806 of the Gulag prisoners died working in the sub-zero temperatures between 1935 and 1936.

On , @cmardukh, who visited the town, says “there are human bones everywhere in the soil,” a grim reminder of the past.