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Death Valley more than lived up to its name on Sunday, when the mercury in the aptly named village of Furnace Creek soared to 130 degrees, possibly the highest temperature on Earth, according to a report.
The scorching reading was reached at 3:41 p.m. amid a historic heat wave in the West, according to the National Weather Service. If verified, it would break Death Valley’s previous August record by three degrees, The Washington Post reported.
It would also be among the three highest temperatures ever measured on Earth at any time – and could, in fact, be the highest, according to the newspaper.
“Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that this is a legitimate sighting,” said Randy Cerveny, who heads the Weather and Climate Extremes team at the World Meteorological Organization, in an email.
“I recommend that the World Meteorological Organization accepts this observation in advance. In the coming weeks we will, of course, be reviewing it in detail, together with the US National Climate Extremes Committee, using one of our international assessment teams, ”added Cerven.
Caroline Rohe, a ranger at Death Valley National Park, posted a photo of the stratospheric reading on a thermometer at the visitor center.
“It could be a world record temperature! We hit 130 degrees today in Death Valley. (The visitor center thermometer works 3-4 degrees warmer.), ”She writes.
The eastern California desert holds the record for the hottest temperature on earth – 134 degrees, which the US Weather Bureau recorded on July 10, 1913 in Furnace Creek.
However, this measure remains controversial.
In 2016, Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data, concluded that this was “essentially not possible from a meteorological point of view,” the outlet reported.
Some experts believe that the 129 degrees recorded in Death Valley on June 30, 2013 and in Kuwait and Pakistan in 2016 and 2017, respectively, are the highest ever reliably measured on Earth.
If the 130 degrees recorded on Sunday are confirmed, it would be the highest officially recorded temperature on the planet since 1931, and the third since 1873, according to the Washington Post.
The only two highest include the 1913 reading in Death Valley and a 131 degree rating from Kebili, Tunisia, July 7, 1931, which also has “serious credibility issues,” Burt told the newspaper.
Furnace Creek, which lies 190 feet below sea level in the Mojave Desert, is renowned for its scorching heat.
In July 2018, its average temperature of 108.1 degrees made it the hottest month on Earth ever measured. During that month, it hit at least 120 degrees for three weeks.
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