Death Valley does not have the hottest surface temperature on Earth
People often say that Death Valley in California is the hottest place on Earth. Its record high temperature is 56.7 degrees Celsius (or 134.1 degrees Fahrenheit), but that’s just how hot the air is.
New research on the hottest places on Earth’s surface has found that the Lut Desert (Dasht-e Lut) in Iran and the Sonoran Desert in North America are much worse places to walk on.
High-resolution satellite data from the last 20 years shows that the land in these two areas can get as hot as 80.8°C (177.4°F) at times.
The Lut Desert has the highest land surface temperature in the world. Between 2002 and 2019, this patch of sand often got very hot. This is likely because it is between a range of mountains, which trap hot air above the dunes, especially the parts that are covered in black volcanic rock.
The results back up an earlier study from 2011 that said the Lut Desert was one of the hottest places on Earth.
This piece of sand had the hottest surface temperatures on Earth from 2004 to 2007 and again in 2009. In 2005, the area reached a high of 70.7 °C (159.3 °F), but the authors of this new paper say that number is probably too low.
Since that first study, NASA has put out a new version of its satellite software, which makes it easier to measure the temperature of the Earth’s land surface. Researchers say that the temperatures in the Lut Desert are actually 10 degrees higher than we thought before this new information came out.
The border between the United States and Mexico runs through the Sonoran Desert, which can also get very hot, but not as often as in the Lut Desert. It is mostly in an area where it doesn’t rain, and this desert’s low elevation makes it hard for air to rise and cool.
Because the Sonoran is also surrounded by mountains, it is easy for heat to get trapped in the dry basin. This causes the temperature of the air and then the temperature of the land to rise, like a sidewalk that is boiling on a hot day.
It’s not clear how much climate change has caused these extreme temperatures, but the hottest days ever recorded by satellites have happened in recent years, especially during La Nia, a climate oscillation that can change with global warming.
“While we know a lot about how the atmosphere reacts to more human-made emissions, we don’t know much about how the land surface reacts to different types of emissions,” the authors write.
It is hoped that future research in this area will shed light not only on how extremes have changed in the past, but also on how they are likely to affect our planet in the future.
The new study was able to find both the hottest and coldest places on Earth. Antarctica easily beat the previous record with a low temperature of -110.9 °C (-199.6 °F), which is 20 degrees lower than what was thought before.
In this part of the world, the sunlight isn’t very strong, and a lot of it is bounced back into the air by snow and ice. The surface temperature of Antarctica drops even more when strong winds and a low pressure system happen at the same time.
To find out how ground temperatures are changing in the modern era, more research needs to be done on remote land masses that are too far away for weather stations to reach.
