Death Valley hits 130° F, the hottest recorded temperature on Earth since 1931
Amid a sweltering heat wave across the western United States, a remote spot in Death Valley, Calif., may have just earned the title of hottest place on Earth in nearly a century. On August 16, the Death Valley spot — appropriately named Furnace Creek, with a population of 24 — logged a temperature of 130° Fahrenheit (54.4° Celsius). If verified by the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, that temperature will be the hottest recorded since 1931, and the third hottest since record keeping began. Furnace Creek also holds the record for hottest recorded temperature on Earth, logged in 1913 at 134° F (56.7° C). In second place is Kebili, Tunisia, with a logged temperature of 55.0° C (131° F) on July 7, 1931. The verification process for such global records of weather extremes, which are archived at WMO, may take months, says archive chief Randall Cerveny, a meteorologist at Arizona State University in...