The calmest place on Earth has been discovered, not on a tropical island or a remote mountain valley but on top of a vast icy plateau in Antarctica.

Scientists pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, high up on the Antarctic Plateau, several hundred miles from the South Pole.

The atmosphere at the site is so still that the stars have lost their twinkle because there is no turbulence in the atmosphere to distort the starlight.

Hardly any weather passes by: few clouds, barely a wisp of wind and no falling snow. The air is 100 times drier than the Sahara and the winter averages -70C (minus 94F), which also gives Ridge A the accolade of the driest and coldest place in the world.

Despite the Antarctic’s reputation for blizzards, the storms tend to be confined to the continent’s valleys and coastline as cold air runs down from the high icesheets like water rushing down from mountains.

High on the vast Antarctic Plateau all is peace and calm, though. At 4,053m (13,300ft) Ridge A is so high that the scientists also discovered that it lies at the head of all three of the Antarctic’s huge glaciers, each the size of Western Europe. This hardly makes Ridge A the ideal tourist destination, but for astronomers it is paradise. A team of Australian and US scientists trawled through data from satellites, ground weather stations and computer climate models to find the ideal location for an astronomical telescope that would not suffer from the weather. Reporting in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, they found one of the least cloudy places in the world where the there is no greenhouse effect and the air is bone dry because it is so cold.

“It just jumped out from our search through the data how good Ridge A was — it’s so calm that there’s almost no wind or weather there at all,” said the British astronomer Will Saunders, the leader of the study and visiting professor at the University of New South Wales.

To add to its tranquillity, Ridge A and the surrounding plateau also lie beneath the calm eye of a polar vortex of winds high in the stratosphere, as calm as the eye of a hurricane. “So the air is calm from the ground all the way up into space,” Professor Saunders said. “The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers. And because the sky is so much darker and drier, it means that a modest-sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on Earth.”

In fact, the scientists hope that a telescope there could take images nearly as good as those from the space-based Hubble telescope. “Antarctica allows you to do a lot of things you’d otherwise have to go into space to do,” Professor Saunders added.

The logistics of building a telescope in such a hostile environment are quite surprising. “In many ways, it’s easier to build a telescope there because there are no hurricanes, earthquakes, dust storms or lightning,” Professor Saunders said.

The biggest difficulty is stopping the mirror of a telescope being covered in frost, but the astronomers found a solution inspired by supermarket chiller cabinets. The vertical displays of chilled food are kept frost-free using a flow of air like an invisible curtain, and a similar flow of air also can keep telescopes free of frost.

However, a bigger problem is less easy to solve. It is very difficult to fix a telescope if anything goes wrong during the six-month total darkness of the Antarctic winter. A telescope there needs to be very reliable.

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