Dasht-e Lut desert: the hottest place on earth?

3 min read

3 years ago Robin

Iran’s Dasht-e Lut desert, also known simply as Lut Desert, is only the 25th largest desert in the world, but it holds another record: the highest and surface temperature ever recorded with over 70 degrees Celsius!
Dasht-e Lut (Persian for “Emptiness Plain”) is a large salt desert that, scientists believe, formed on the bottom of a sea. Millions of years ago, tectonic shifts caused the bottom of the sea to rise, with the water slowly evaporating due to the high temperatures.
Today, the area is a barren land about 51,800 square kilometers in size, surrounded by mountains on all sides, which contributes to the record-setting temperatures recorded here, as they prevent humid air from the Mediterranean and Arabian Sea to reach it.

The Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer installed on NASA’s Aqua satellite surveyed the globe between 2003 and 2010 and the collected data revealed that the hottest land temperature on average was recorded here.
The highest temperature recorded by the satellite was 70.7 degrees Celsius, in 2005, but the Iranian desert also had the highest yearly temperature in five of the seven years of satellite data.
Either way, the hottest part of Dasht-e Lut is a region called Gandom Beryan, a plateau covered with volcanic black pebbles, about 480 square kilometers large. The dark pebbles are one of the determining factors for the extreme land temperatures, as they absorb more energy from sunlight, only reflecting a fraction of it.
Interestingly, the name Gandom Beryan (“Toasted wheat” in Persian) is inspired by a local legend about a load of wheat left in the desert that became scorched after a few days.
And, with temperatures reaching nearly 70.7 degrees Celsius, that legend doesn’t sound so hard to believe!

Another contributing factor to the extreme heat of Dasht-e Lut is the lack of vegetation. The salty soil makes it very hard for even the toughest of plants to survive, and the only signs of plant life in the area are desert lichen and tamarisk, resilient shrubs that can grow up to 10 meters tall.

“The hottest temperatures were observed at locations without vegetation,” climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado told NASA. “This means that if landscape change in a region results in less vegetation, the maximum surface temperatures are expected to be hotter. If an oasis is developed by irrigation from subsurface water in a desert, the maximum temperatures would be less.”

Surprisingly, even though you could fry an egg on the sand of Dasht-e Lut, the air temperature in the area averages around 39 degrees Celsius.
In any case, this very hot superlative is not the only thing that makes this region unique, as the desert is speckled with gigantic rock formations, some of the tallest sand dunes in the world, salt plains, sinkholes, forgotten castles, and wolves that roam around at night. If visitors, of course, are advised not to explore Lut Desert in the summer, beware that in winter and spring the nighttime temperatures drop below zero…