North Dakotans are a hearty bunch. While winter is always cold here, we also seem to get a few days every year so cold that he state has to issue warnings about how dangerously cold it is. We tend to wear this fact like a badge of honor. When friends and family around the country complain to us about single-digit temperatures, we proudly ask them to hold our beer while we share stories of temperatures in the negative teens, and wind chill that makes it colder still.

If this sounds familiar to you, we've got another juicy nugget of information for you to drop on your whining aunt next time they get an inch of snow.

For the past few days, there are parts of Mars that have been warmer than North Dakota.

Mars
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According to Weather.com, as of this writing, the highest temperatures today in the Bismarck-Mandan area was -9° F. Meanwhile information from the Curiosity rover on the big red planet relayed yesterday that it experienced a high temperature of 19° F during Sol 2302, which is it's most recent report. You can follow updates from Curiosity on Twitter here.

It should be noted that, overall, Mars is much colder than Earth. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum points out that Mars has a considerably thinner atmosphere than Earth, making it far more difficult to retain heat. As a result, the average global temperature of Mars is -80 ° F.

Right now the Curiosity rover is just south of Mars' equator, where the planet is just beginning what the Smithsonian describes as the start of its "tropical wintertime." The museum also points out that while the temperature high marks might be comparable to Earth, the lows are still far more extreme, sometimes dropping as low as -115.6° F.

But feel free to leave that part out while you brag to your cold-sensitive friends on social media.

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