Mondo Knows Facts
The Lut Desert holds the hottest land surface recorded
Satellite readings there passed 70 degrees Celsius, hotter than any other ground on Earth The Dasht-e Lut in south-east Iran has dark pebbles and closed basins that trap heat. NASA instruments recorded surface temperatures near 70 degrees in 2005, and later years came close. The same winds have carved long ridges called yardangs out of the bedrock. It sits in Mondo's world geography collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
The Lut Desert holds the hottest land surfaceSatellites measured 70.7 degrees Celsius on its dark sand in 2005The Zagros folds contain buried salt domesAncient seawater salts rose through the crumpling rock and pushed up rounded domesDeserts have named surfaces, from sand to stoneGeographers separate sandy ergs, stony regs and rocky hamadas, and each forms differentlyThe Kalahari is not quite a true desertIt gets enough rain to grow grass and trees, so many classify it as dry savannaAntarctica is technically the largest desert on EarthAntarctica receives an average of less than 200 millimetres of precipitation each year along its coast and far less inland.The Atacama Desert is the driest non-polar desert on EarthSome weather stations in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile have never recorded a single drop of rainfall.
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Tags: deserts, iran, heat
The Lut Desert holds the hottest land surface recorded: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Satellite readings there passed 70 degrees Celsius, hotter than any other ground on Earth. The figure is taken from NASA Earth Observatory, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a world geography fact?
- Yes. It sits on the World Geography shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.