Move Over, Death Valley: These Are the Two Hottest Spots On Earth (sciencemag.org) 76
sciencehabit writes: Death Valley holds the record for the highest air temperature on the planet: On July 10, 1913, temperatures at the aptly named Furnace Creek area in the California desert reached a blistering 56.7C (134.1F). Average summer temperatures, meanwhile, often rise above 45C (113F). But when it comes to surface temperature, two spots have Death Valley beat. A new analysis of high-resolution satellite data finds the Lut Desert in Iran and the Sonoran Desert along the Mexican-U.S. border have recently reached a sizzling 80.8C (177.4F). The study uncovered other superlatives. The maximum temperature swing in a single day was 81.8C (147.3F), from -23.7C (-10.7F) to 58.1C (136.6F) on July 20, 2006 in China's Qaidam Basin, a crescent-shaped depression hemmed in by mountains on the Tibetan Plateau. And the coldest spot on our planet? No big surprise: Antarctica. But a satellite reading of 0110.9C (-167.6F) in 2016 is more than 20 degrees chillier than the coldest air temperature recorded in 1983. The findings have been reported in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
typoL 0110.9C (-167.6F) should be read as -110.9C (Score:5, Informative)
Re: typoL 0110.9C (-167.6F) should be read as -11 (Score:2)
That looks like someone opened command.com using edit.exe
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That's about a degree lower than the freezing point for carbon dioxide.
Not The Same Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not The Same Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Came in to say basically the same thing. Surface temperatures and air temperatures are not the same thing. Also, surface temperatures of up to 93.3 degrees Celcius, which is higher than the highest temp from the summary. I did not bother reading the article itself since, by the title, it's clearly clickbait garbage.
Also, if we're counting surface temperature records, are we only counting places where the ground is being warmed by the sun? Because clearly the surface temperatures in some geologically active areas get higher. Especially in places right after a volcanic eruption where the ground is literally lava.
So, just overall not a useful article.
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It's amazing this gets modded down because it is exactly what the site looks like to anyone that's read for a decade or more.
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This is not a news for nerds site anymore. This site was purchased by BIZX using Chinese money to push Chinese propaganda. During the quiet times, they cram gay clickbait like this down everyone's throats.
He’s right, you know.
I used to be straight and white, but 6 months on Slashdot and BOOM, now I’m Chinese and gay.
Fuck you, Slashdot ... where’s the rest of my penis???
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Never mind that, you now speak Mandarin.
Re: Not The Same Thing (Score:2)
The actual scientific article is interesting, and although they don't mention volcanic activity, they do mention avoiding wildfires. Incidentally MODIS is frequently used to identify wildfires by thermal anomaly.
I'm curious what's making the surface temperature of those locations hotter than, say, a large asphalt parking lot. I would think that both deserts have somewhat high albedo compared to asphalt.
Re: Not The Same Thing (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like both the Lut desert and the Sonoran desert have lots of basalt. That would probably explain it.
Re: Not The Same Thing (Score:2)
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(the whole Eastern border region of Iran is deemed to be very unsafe due to smuggling activities from Afghanistan and Pakistan)
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As long as we're talking about history and Iran and high, crazy people. We might as well discuss that the original order of assassins were Persian, therefore based out of what is now Iran and therefore near the Lut desert. The possibly apocryphal story is that 'assassin' is based on Hashishim, because they consumed copious amounts of hashish (either to help them be fearless in battle, or as a way of brainwashing people into the order). So, if there's any truth to the story then there would have been drugged
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I would think that both deserts have somewhat high albedo compared to asphalt.
I hardly think that deserts want to have sex and I know asphalt doesn’t.
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A the surface of a dark roof in Phoenix can get up to 70C or more on a hot, sunny day with an ambient high temperature of 43C, so I don't think 80C is out of the question.
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Just to be clear, are you saying that you are an expert? Can you give citations for the specific science you're talking about that shows that sunlight can't heat a material to 80 degrees celcius? And also how that science explains solar water heaters that heat water above 90 degrees Celcius.
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Exactly. I've gotten into cars exposed to full sun on summer days where the air was so hot my lungs seemed to stop working. Quite clearly how hot something can get from sunlight depends on how well it can absorb and retain heat from the sun
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Air that hot can be quite dangerous, even to healthy adults, but even more so to children. Quite a few end up accidentally killed this way. I'd recommend always letting it air out for as long as necessary.
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The only absolute limit I know of to the temperature you can reach from sunlight is the temperature of the surface of the sun. Even then, that's only using conventional optics, you could certainly use solar panels to power various kinds of devices that can get hotter than the sun. As far as rock, etc. consider that it's not drawing in ambient heat, it's being heated directly by the sunlight. How hot it will get depends on how fast it loses heat to its environment.
Re:Not The Same Thing (Score:4, Informative)
I did not bother reading the article itself since, by the title, it's clearly clickbait garbage.
It's quite a shame since TFA says things such as "Surface temperatures tend to run hotter than the air above, especially on sunny days when surfaces are heated both by air and the Sun’s radiant energy" TFA is very clear that they are not making a comparison to Death Valley, and they are very clear that it's *surface temperatures* which are increasing.
If you read TFA you may also have learnt about advancements in MODIS, as well as how La Nina may be involved and also what surface temperatures mean for life.
But it's nowhere near as fun as jumping on a forum and bitching about something you didn't even bother to read.
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It might have contained interesting information, but the title is inaccurate enough that it constitutes a lie. It's a clickbait title and fills me with disgust. That's what I'm complaining about, not the content of the article. It's enough to make me not want to read the article. There are enough details from the article in the summary to refute the title and interpret what we know, however, so I did choose to discuss that.
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So, just overall not a useful article.
You didn't read the article. You took a guess at what the content was. Based on your post you're pretty bad at guessing. And somehow you managed to pass judgement as to the article's usefulness.
All of this points to one obvious question: Which congressional district do you represent?
Actually that was mean. You could also be a reporter for Breitbart, or OAN. Like our senators they too pass judgement on things while admitting they didn't bother to even take a glance at them.
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I didn't take a guess. The people who wrote the article gave it a title and slashdot "summarized" it. I've read the article since. It does not say much more than the summary does. It's still poorly researched clickbait garbage. It does not establish the claim from the title since death valley also appears to have higher recorded surface temperatures than those places. Maybe they meant higher average? They didn't say so.
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I've read the article since. It does not say much more than the summary does.
So you didn't read the article then considering the content is far more in depth.
So yeah still very much a post full of bullshit... You didn't answer the question? Are you in fact a politician who only reads things after commenting? I mean lying about making an informed decision about it after the fact fits the bill as well.
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You didn't answer the question? Are you in fact a politician who only reads things after commenting?
I'm sorry I thought that was just an inexplicably hostile rhetorical question. Rereading it realize that... it's still an inexplicably hostile rhetorical question. I mean, after all, you can't seriously believe it to be the case.
The content of the article is not more in depth, it has the basic facts from the summary, a tiny bit about the MODIS satellite that does not contain any new information. All that's really there is some surface temperature data from a few places and still nothing actually supporting
Re: Wait (Score:1)
No.
Apples to Apples? (Score:5, Insightful)
The comparison with Death Valley in the press release isn't really apples-to-apples, based upon the paper. MODIS is giving land surface (skin) temperature, not air temperature, while the Death Valley record is air temperature. Those can be very different, like a hot asphalt parking lot surface in summer vs the air above it. The article is upfront about this - they're looking for the hottest/coldest surface temperatures. They mention Death Valley but point out that surface temperatures are going to be different.
I'm not sure Death Valley should move over quite yet...
Re:Apples to Apples? (Score:5, Funny)
Who is even going to pay for that huge logistics operation.
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And who would execute it if it was funded?
Maybe Industrial Techtonics Inc., if the Death Valley project funds before the Committee to Reunite Gondwanaland raises enough for their larger project
===
(Seriously: Industrial Techtonics Inc. makes very accurate spherical objects - but on the scale of ball bearings, not planets.)
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The comparison with Death Valley in the press release isn't really apples-to-apples
Indeed, and they address this in TFA, and if you actually read the words "But in terms of surface temperature" you'd realise that neither TFA nor TFS is making any comparison to Death Valley.
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* At least they aren't comparing Death Valley's air temperature. They are quite clear on this. They are comparing it to Death Valley's surface temperature and in that regard it was beat.
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Sure (Score:2)
but it doesn't have nearly as cool a name, now does it? ;)
Low Cost Solution for Climate Change (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the coldest temperature (in Antarctica) is -110C (there's a typo in the summary), that means that CO2 will freeze out of the atmosphere as "dry ice". Just pack it up and get rid of it!
That's the conclusion of a study done (I think in the 70s) by a bunch of Japanese scientists and more recently being studied by the Purdue University Climate dept. Since the average(?) winter temperature in Antartica's high desert is around -70C and the freezing temperature of CO2 is -79C, it wouldn't take much refrigeration (energy) to freeze it solid. Their proposal is to set up refrigeration units at some of the valleys where the cold winds from the interior come blasting out to the ocean, it would be eas(ier) to set them up along the coast than bringing the equipment into the interior. As an added bonus, the winds would provide the energy to run the units.
I know the Antarctic is hardly the place to do very large scale industrial projects but it's probably a lot cheaper than building space mirrors or whatnot.
Then the problem becomes, what do you DO with all the solid CO2 produced? They proposed burying it but that has problems, like how do you keep it frozen, FOREVER. My idea is: dump it into the ocean. Dry ice is denser than sea water so it'll sink and, more importantly, after 1000meters deep, the pressure will keep it from turning back into a gas even if the temperature rises to 0C (the temperature of the deep ocean). I figure you could probably get away with just dumping sufficiently large pieces into the ocean, by the time it reached those depths only a small fraction would have sublimated away. But for efficiency you'll probably just use a pipe or conveyer system.
Anyway, think of it as the reverse of methane clathrates being released from the seabed :)
There are places near the Antarctic coast where the continental shelf isn't very wide, only 10km or so and you're in deep water. A few of these places happen to be co-located near the mouths of the valleys that you would want to put your refrigeration units. So a giant conveyer belt or pipe (or a fleet of short range ships) could easily bring the frozen CO2 to a place deep enough to keep it from coming back PERMANENTLY.
Of course there is the potential ecological impact of having billions of tons of CO2 lying around in the abyss; for a fairly large area (a few hundred kilometers square?) it could be lethal to the organisms living there. However the Southern Ocean is a very big place and the impact would likely be only regional. Also you might be able to keep it much more localized by having it dumped into an undersea trench. (If you're really smart you could probably dump it somewhere where it will be subjected by a tectonic plate and recycled geophysically over hundreds of millions of years.) Still this should, of course, be studied further.
Anyway, the general idea is: use the cold of Antarctica to freeze the CO2 then dump it into the depths
* By the way, while you're taking a break, take this climate game from the climate risk lab! :). https://survivethecentury.net/ [survivethecentury.net]
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Oops! It should read "sub-ducted" not "subjected". Stupid auto-correct!
Re: Low Cost Solution for Climate Change (Score:2)
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Then the problem becomes, what do you DO with all the solid CO2 produced?
You don't; it's a liability; a disaster waiting to happen (and an argument could possibly be made that it ties up vast quantities of O2 that were playing an important role in our system).
Instead, you produce pure C - inert carbon. Done right, humanity could produce gigatons of incredibly useful building materials with it (perhaps composites with a nanotube inner matrix for tensile strength and a diamond outer coating for hardness).
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Re: Low Cost Solution for Climate Change (Score:2)
Re:Low Cost Solution for Climate Change (Score:5, Insightful)
It is true that the pressure of the deep ocean, and its temperature, can keep dense CO2 liquid and you could have a sea under the sea (shades of Sponge Bob and the beach at Bikini Bottom). But the problem is that the CO2 will dissolve into the water layer above it and fatally acidify the ocean.
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Actually I took a quick look at this and a study I found "Solubility of Water in LIQUID Carbon Dioxide" says that over the temperature ranges in question, water didn't dissolve in the liquid CO2 (or at least less than the experimental error of 0.05 percent).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/1... [acs.org]
Now that, of course is water dissolving in liquid CO2 and not the other way around but (I assume) these are basically the same? I mean if oil won't dissolve in water then water won't dissolve in oil right? (I'm not a ch
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Anyway, the general idea is: use the cold of Antarctica to freeze the CO2 then dump it into the depths
Sure you can suck the localized CO2 out of the atmosphere, but I suspect that (lack of) atmospheric mixing will not bring the world's CO2 to your doorstep.
The air in the extreme southern latitudes is some of the cleanest in the world, so even industrial pollution hasn't made it down that far. Thus indicating the lack of mixing
Re: Low Cost Solution for Climate Change (Score:2)
One tiny problem (Score:2)
However the Southern Ocean is a very big place and the impact would likely be only regional.
Really? Carbon dioxide is water-soluble, especially at high pressure. What you have invented is a global-sized SodaSteam [sodastream.ca] for the oceans, not a solution to global warming.
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CO2 freezing temperature is -79 C for pure CO2 at atmospheric pressure. Just like water doesn't spontaneously condense out of ambient air below 100 C, that wouldn't happen with CO2 either.
You'd need to compress air (0.04% CO2) a factor 2500 for the CO2 to freeze at -79 C or lower the temperature down to -150 C, both of which cost a lot of energy.
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Very good point! I hadn't thought of that (I just came up with the idea for dumping it in the ocean). It might not be 2500 atmospheres but it is a lot. :(
Anyway, the good folks at Purdue seem to be working on a way to have it condense(?) or snow(?) at those temperatures, they're actual scientists (unlike me). From some things I've seen, they're actually building apparatus to do this.
Perhaps if there is some sort of surface, perhaps nano textured, the CO2 can more easily condense (crystallize?) out. Some
Found the Source of Global Warming (Score:2)
No big surprise: Antarctica. But a satellite reading of 0110.9C (-167.6F) in 2016 is more than 20 degrees chillier than the coldest air temperature recorded in 1983.
The hell do you mean no big surprise?!? Isn't it obvious that President Skroob has Operation Vacu-Heat going on right now, from his secret lair in Antarctica!?
Greedy bastard wants all of our cool...
Death Valley never was the hottest. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to anyone outside the US.
Just ask anyone from the Arabic peninsula. What Death Valley calls a record is what they call a normal summer temperature.
It's just that because if a kid's born into a backwards society, his measurements are ignored or he doesn't even get to do any measurements, even if he doesn't like that society himself.
Besides: I'm more interested in what is the hottest *humid* place. Because that's where the real suffering is. ;)
Re: Death Valley never was the hottest. (Score:2)
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Death Valley is pretty hot. (Score:2)
US people must do something... (Score:3)
Can't be left behind (Score:3)
Ground temp is a meaningless measurement (Score:5, Insightful)
That's Hawt (Score:1)
I mean really hot!
Who cares? (Score:2)
So what? I bet if I spread a large black tarp in Death Valley, I can beat those satellite temps.
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So what? I bet if I spread a large black tarp in Death Valley, I can beat those satellite temps
You don’t have the balls to spread a large black tarp in Death Valley!