Death Valley
Though it probably won’t surprise anyone that a place appropriately called “Death Valley” was toasty in the summer, this year was still a shocker for the magnitude of heat. Temperatures hit a mind-melting 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) in July, a mark that’s considered the hottest reliably recorded temperature on the planet.
Only two other temperature readings—134-degree-Fahrenheit (56.7-degree-Celsius) reading in Death Valley on July 10, 1913, and a 131-degree-Fahrenheit (55-degree-Celsius) measurement in Kebili, Tunisia, on July 7, 1931—have ranked higher than this year’s scorcher, though weather historians have called those two readings into question.
