Every summer, a handful of places on Earth stake an informal claim to being the hottest spot on the planet, with readings from the Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula and inland Australia occasionally making headlines. None of them has come close to unseating the record set more than a century ago in a low desert basin east of the Sierra Nevada in California.
A 1913 reading that has stood for more than a century
The mark comes from Furnace Creek, a low-lying weather station inside Death Valley National Park that sits roughly 190 feet below sea level. The United States Weather Bureau logged a reading of 134 degrees Fahrenheit, or 56.7 degrees Celsius, at the site on July 10, 1913. The World Meteorological Organization still lists that figure as the highest reliably recorded surface air temperature anywhere on Earth, a benchmark that has outlasted well over a hundred subsequent summers without being matched.
According to the official climate record for the park, the reading has not gone entirely unchallenged. Modern climatologists reviewing the instrumentation and observation practices of the period have raised doubts about whether the 1913 measurement and several other extreme readings from that same era were fully accurate, pointing to known issues with early thermometer shelters and observer training. Even so, no competing agency has moved to formally strike the figure from the record books, and it remains the number cited by the World Meteorological Organization and the National Park Service alike.
Why one valley runs hotter than everywhere around it
Death Valley’s extreme heat comes down to a combination of geography that few other places on the planet share. The valley floor sits far below sea level, trapping dense, superheated air in a long, narrow basin flanked by steep mountain ranges on both sides. Those surrounding peaks block cooling ocean breezes from reaching the valley floor while also reflecting and radiating additional heat downward, and the basin’s dark, sparsely vegetated rock and sediment absorb sunlight efficiently rather than reflecting it away. The combination lets air near the ground reach temperatures that most other low-elevation deserts, lacking that same bowl-shaped trap, simply cannot sustain.
The valley’s dryness compounds the effect. Average rainfall across the basin comes in at under two inches a year, a small fraction of what most desert regions receive, which means there is little moisture in the soil or air to absorb heat energy through evaporation the way wetter climates do. With almost no humidity to buffer the heat, nearly all of the sun’s incoming energy each day goes directly into raising the temperature of the ground and the air just above it.
The modern era’s closest attempts to match it
Even as global average temperatures have climbed in recent decades, Death Valley itself has struggled to approach its own 1913 mark. The highest temperature considered fully reliable by modern standards came on August 16, 2020, and again on July 9, 2021, when the Furnace Creek station recorded 130 degrees Fahrenheit, or 54.4 degrees Celsius, on both occasions. That figure still stands as the highest reliably measured temperature recorded anywhere on Earth in the modern instrumental era, even though it falls nearly four degrees short of the disputed 1913 reading.
More recently, July 2024 brought the hottest month ever logged at the park, with the Furnace Creek station recording a 24-hour average temperature of 108.5 degrees Fahrenheit across the month and a peak daily reading of 129.2 degrees on July 7. Scientists monitoring the park’s long-term climate data have noted that summer overnight lows have also crept upward over recent decades, meaning the valley is increasingly failing to cool off after dark even when its single hottest daytime readings fall short of the historical extremes.
Life in a landscape built to punish mistakes
The same conditions that make Death Valley a record-setter also make it dangerous for the unprepared. Park rangers routinely respond to heat-related medical emergencies among visitors during peak summer months, when daytime highs regularly top 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade even on unremarkable days, and overnight lows can remain in the 90s. Vehicles are known to overheat on the steep grades leading out of the basin, and hikers who underestimate the heat on backcountry trails have died from heat illness in the park in past summers, prompting the Park Service to post frequent warnings advising visitors to limit exertion to early morning hours and carry far more water than they might expect to need elsewhere.
Despite the risk, the valley’s extremes are also part of its draw. Visitors travel from around the world specifically to stand at Furnace Creek and photograph a thermometer reading well above 120 degrees, turning the same conditions that make the basin nearly uninhabitable in summer into one of the park’s biggest tourism attractions during the hottest months of the year.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
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