The earth has a lot of warm places: forest fires, lava floes, iron foundries, the inside
of your toaster oven, nuclear reactors, and so forth.
But, if we're just talking about regular old sun-heats-the-earth climate and weather, where
on the earth's surface is hottest?
Some might say "Death Valley," which isn't a bad guess, as the 56.7°Celsius temperature
observed 100 years ago on July 10, 1913-- at aptly named Furnace Creek -- remains, according
to official weather statistics, the highest temperature ever recorded.
However, weather stations measure air temperature in the shade about a meter and a half above
the ground.
And as you know if you've ever walked barefoot across a beach on a hot day, surfaces in direct
sunlight can be a lot hotter than the air just above them.
Plus, there are only 11,119 official weather stations scattered across the globe, which
equates to only 1 station every 13,000 square kilometers, or about six on average for an
area the size of Scotland (not that Scotland is a leading candidate for heat waves).
Super hot places like deserts are particularly harsh and remote, making weather stations
impractical and even less common.
So to find the true hottest place on earth, we need an army of meteorology students to
install and monitor thermometers on every inch of the planet.
Or we could measure the the temperature of the earth from space... which NASA does, every
day.
The Terra and Aqua satellites carry instruments called spectroradiometers which detect the
infrared radiation, that is, the heat, radiating from the Earth's surface.
Their resolution isn't amazing, since the satellites measure temperature averaged over
each square kilometer of the globe, but that's still 13,000 times better than weather stations.
And the winner for hottest square kilometer on earth?
Not Furnace Creek - it only clocked in at 62.7C. Not the "Scorched Wheat" plateau in
the Lut Desert of Iran, either, despite repeated claims to be the hottest place on earth.
However, it's close - a nearby portion of the Lut Desert is the winner at 70.7C, or
159.3F. That's one degree hotter than you need for the proteins in an egg yolk to coagulate
- that is, to cook.
No need for your toaster oven - breakfast is served.