What Is the Hottest Place on Earth?
Where is the hottest place on Earth? If you took elementary-school geography any time before, say, a month ago, you would be correct in answering the North African desert nation of Libya, a place that is so much in the news these days for mostly unfortunate reasons.
More specifically, for decades, the canonical answer to the question has been El Azizia, Libya, where, on September 13, 1922—just a shade over 90 years ago, that is—Italian military observers recorded a temperature of 136° Fahrenheit (57.8° Celsius), a record that no other place on the planet could beat for decade after decade.
Hillsides in Death Valley National Park, going northwest from Furnace Creek (site of the world's hottest recorded temperature in 1913). Credit: courtesy of Stephen Strom © 2010, www.stephenstrom.com
Now, measuring heat in the desert is a tricky thing. In Tucson, Arizona, where I live, the average daily temperature was for a very long time not much different from that of Phoenix, which lies 100-odd miles to the north, at the very northern edge of the Sonoran Desert, and is 1,500 feet lower in elevation. When the National Weather Service thermometer was relocated away from the tarmac and white painted rocks near the airport’s control tower, the temperature fell some, enough to make area boosters trumpet that if you didn’t want to fry in summertime, you should vacation in the southerly metropolis. In short, the temperatures weren’t different enough to deter an egg from frying on an inviting sidewalk. What’s more, nighttime minimal temperature for Tucson was increasing, too, as a consequence of the city’s becoming ever more steadily an asphalt-encased “heat island.”
Both Tucson and Phoenix are officially hot, then. So is El Azizia, though it has the benefit of lying quite near the Mediterranean Sea and thus enjoying at least the possibility of cooling breezes. It’s therefore probable that El Azizia has never seen a temperature quite as high as the one ascribed to it, which the World Meteorological Organization officially invalidated on the 90th anniversary of the temperature’s making the record books—a bit of synchronicity that might seem a touch heavy-handed were everyone involved in l’affaire libyenne not long since dead and beyond caring.
The WMO, tough customers all, discounted the El Azizia recording on five grounds. One was that the temperature was taken in a paved courtyard, the heat reflecting from the stones to distort the result. Another was that the person doing the recording was new, inexperienced, and perhaps not equipped to use the precision instrument at hand—and such an inexperienced person might conceivably have misread the scale by as much as 7°C. No other temperature taken near El Azizia had approached that 136° high.
South of Furnace Creek (formerly Greenland Ranch), looking across Golden Canyon. Credit: courtesy of Stephen Strom © 2010, www.stephenstrom.com
And so on, evidence mounting atop more evidence, until the long-doubting WMO made its decision. In a final irony, the person who officially busted the Italian military meteorologists of nine decades past is a professor at Arizona State University, located in the simmering, shimmering Phoenix metroplex and thus fully conversant in the ways of heat.
So where does all that put the hottest place on Earth? For the moment—and perhaps only the moment, the warming climate being a matter of fact—that honor goes to Death Valley, California. There, in that low-lying bowl of mountain-ringed desert at the perhaps ironically named Greenland Ranch, on July 10, 1913, the thermometer read 134° Fahrenheit (56.7° C), just shy of El Azizia’s once-wondrous score.
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