Iranian City Soars To Record 129F Degrees: Near Hottest On Earth in Modern Measurements (washingtonpost.com)

A city in southwest Iran posted the country's hottest temperature ever recorded Thursday afternoon, and may have tied the world record for the most extreme high temperature. From a report on The Washington Post: Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at French meteorological agency MeteoFrance, posted to Twitter that the city of Ahvaz soared to "53.7C" (128.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Kapikian said the temperature is a "new absolute national record of reliable Iranian heat" (alternative, non-paywalled source) and that it was the hottest temperature ever recorded in June over mainland Asia. Iran's previous hottest temperature was 127.4. Weather Underground's website indicates the temperature in Ahvaz climbed even higher, hitting 129.2 degrees at both 4:51 and 5 p.m. local time. If that 129.2 degrees reading is accurate, it would arguably tie the hottest temperature ever measured on Earth in modern times.

Comments

Survivability

[Anonymous Coward]

How long can a human survive in 53.7C?

Re:Survivability

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans have this thing called adaptability.
So long as they have water near them and consume it properly, and properly eat to compensate for the loss of energy,
they can do whole military training programs every day at even 60C until the point their bodies have reconfigured themselves
to function no worse at those temperatures than normal people at around 20C. Doesn't matter how weak they started out,
barring a few exceptional cases like asthma for instance, even the weakest twig-like physical equivalent of trash will adapt
and become tougher.

Re:Survivability

[s_p_oneil]

Direct observation/measurement isn't the only method to estimate global temperatures over long periods of time. This chart isn't scientific, and the vast majority of the line is dashed to show the temperature is estimated (not observed directly), but a picture is worth 1000 words:

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...
(On the plus side, we seem to be preventing the next ice age from coming along.)

You could argue that direct observation is the only way to be certain, but that's like arguing that there's no way to be certain that trees existed before mankind showed up to observe and document them. You could take it one step farther and argue that even after humans developed written language, they were probably lying (en masse), in much the same way you believe that 98% of the scientists studying climate are lying. Any fossils found were faked or planted there by God to test the faithless (because he's definitely that petty/vindictive).

Re:Survivability

[ZorinLynx]

Isn't there a point though, where the body can't get rid of heat fast enough and your body temperature starts to rise, causing hyperthermia and heat stroke?

The laws of physics say that if it's 129F and your body temperature is 98.6F, the heat transfer will be INTO your body. At what point is evaporative cooling via sweat no longer enough? There is a physical limit; there has to be.

Mesopotamia?

[skovnymfe]

Isn't Iran in the old Mesopotamia region? The one that almost died out way-back-when because of sudden climate change? I suppose it wouldn't be much of a surprise if that's the first region to go again in the next sudden climate change.

Re:Mesopotamia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me explain this. The myth of the flood was caused by a real fact, which was the breaking of the ice dam that contained the Agassiz Lake [see Wikipedia], in North America, in the final days of the last Ice Age. The lake was the size of today's Black Sea, and all the water was released at once. Sea level rose up very quickly. This event was the basis for the Flood myth and, as a matter of fact, created the already mentioned Black sea and the English Channel/La Manche, among other fetures.

It's easy when you do a little reading once in a while.

Re:129 degrees??

[bill_mcgonigle]

Oh .. you mean 54 degrees .. like was mentioned in TFA

That's 327 K, you backwards Luddite. "Degrees" - what is this, the Dark Ages?

I grew up in a hole in the ground in the desert

[pecosdave]

I have seen very close to that - my home town made it to 128 one summer.

The thing is it was such a shit-hole of a town there are no official weather stations there. All the official measurements were taken miles away in Odessa or other shit-hole towns they happened to put weather stations in or around. Pecos just was ignored, and was in a unique place geological being in a wide plane surrounded by mountain ranges and higher elevations, it created a type of hot-box effect. I was driving a 1983 GMC Sierra Classic at the time. The little orange needle that showed if you were in PRND1-2 melted in half and the spring pulled it to the left. My sisters walkman melted in it.

So, due to all of the locals reading their own thermometers and the local channel 6 (which was just a CGA graphics info readout) saying it got up to 128 I know it was there. Since Kermit Texas some miles to the North never made it that high we never officially made it there.

That was in 1994 I believe. As far as I know it hasn't passed 118 or so since. My dad tells me in 75 or so when he was working the feedlots it got up to about 132. I wasn't born yet so I certainly can't confirm that one.

At least in my little world both the hot and the cold extremes have tapered based on my own limited observations. The rains have become more erratic, but having moved away from that area my own observations are no longer current.

Near highest ever?

[planckscale]

The official highest recorded temperature is now 56.7C (134F), which was measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch, Death Valley, California, USA. So yeah it's pretty high but call me when it gets to 135F.

Re:Past the boiling point of water?

[omnichad]

The point is that the scale is more granular for indoor/outdoor temperatures while staying in integer units. For Celsius, you really have to go out to one decimal point to be very accurate with outdoor temperatures. In this case, it was Fahrenheit with an added decimal, because of the fact that it's a very specific record.

You say I can't perceive a 1 degree F change, but my thermostat moves in 1 degree increments and I do notice a difference based on the setting. And Celsius thermostats tend to all go in 0.5 degree increments.