Temperature taken in Death Valley, California, on Sunday revealed the desert’s Furnace Creek hit 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever recorded.
The notorious desert’s record comes as the west is struggling with a massive heatwave that has caused deadly fires and blackouts, the New York Daily News reported. More than 30 million people are under excessive heat alerts and those near fires have been evacuated as the inferno’s engulf their homes, while those a little further away are wearing masks to endure the smoke from the wildfires.
The heat is not waning overnight either, which can make it even more dangerous, as the body uses the night to cool off and recover from the heat of the day.
“There is some level of astonishment at the pace at which records have been broken in recent weeks, but in some ways what we have seen in Death Valley — an all-time reliable heat record — is less extraordinary than some of the other records we saw in Canada and the north-west, where records were exceeded by such a large margin that they left people dumbfounded,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The highest temperature ever was logged in July, 1913, but the equipment used to measure the heat was less precise than the technology available today.
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smarcus@hamodia.com