In the Persian language ‘Lut’ refers to bare land without water and devoid of vegetation. At 2,278,015 ha the area is large and is surrounded by a buffer zone of 1,794,134 ha. In any case, this very hot superlative is not the only thing that makes this region unique, as the desert is speckled with gigantic rock formations, some of the tallest sand dunes in the world, salt plains, sinkholes, forgotten castles, and wolves that roam around at night.The Lut Desert is in the southeast of the Islamic Republic of Iran, an arid continental subtropical area notable for a rich variety of spectacular desert landforms. Surprisingly, even though you could fry an egg on the sand of Dasht-e Lut, the air temperature in the area averages around 39 degrees Celsius. If an oasis is developed by irrigation from subsurface water in a desert, the maximum temperatures would be less.” “ This means that if landscape change in a region results in less vegetation, the maximum surface temperatures are expected to be hotter. of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado told NASA.

“ The hottest temperatures were observed at locations without vegetation,” climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. The salty soil makes it very hard for even the toughest of plants to survive, and the only signs of plant life in the area are desert lichen and tamarisk, resilient shrubs that can grow up to 10 meters tall.

Interestingly, the name Gandom Beryan (“Toasted wheat” in Persian) is inspired by a local legend about a load of wheat left in the desert that became scorched after a few days.Īnd, with temperatures reaching nearly 70.7 degrees Celsius, that legend doesn’t sound so hard to believe!Īnother contributing factor to the extreme heat of Dasht-e Lut is the lack of vegetation. The dark pebbles are one of the determining factors for the extreme land temperatures, as they absorb more energy from sunlight, only reflecting a fraction of it. The highest temperature recorded by the satellite was 70.7 degrees Celsius, in 2005, but the Iranian desert also had the highest yearly temperature in five of the seven years of satellite data.Įither way, the hottest part of Dasht-e Lut is a region called Gandom Beryan, a plateau covered with volcanic black pebbles, about 480 square kilometers large. The Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer installed on NASA’s Aqua satellite surveyed the globe between 20 and the collected data revealed that the hottest land temperature on average was recorded here. Today, the area is a barren land about 51,800 square kilometers in size, surrounded by mountains on all sides, which contributes to the record-setting temperatures recorded here, as they prevent humid air from the Mediterranean and Arabian Sea to reach it.

Millions of years ago, tectonic shifts caused the bottom of the sea to rise, with the water slowly evaporating due to the high temperatures. Iran’s Dasht-e Lut desert, also known simply as Lut Desert, is only the 25th largest desert in the world, but it holds another record: the highest and surface temperature ever recorded with over 70 degrees Celsius!ĭasht-e Lut (Persian for “Emptiness Plain”) is a large salt desert that, scientists believe, formed on the bottom of a sea.

Dasht e lut