On an August afternoon in August 2020, temperatures reached 54.4°C (130°F) in Death Valley National Park, a desert park in eastern California, and half of the daytime temperatures reached 48.8°C and above in July. In July 2021 and July 2023, this extreme heat was reached here again. Needless to say, this is one of the hottest places on earth.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
At this time, visitors may feel the physical threat of suffocation, body warming and lack of water in the dense heat wave.
This desertified region also shows its most ruthless side at this time. Here, the sweat of the person evaporates almost as soon as it appears. Under extreme heat, the human body will suffer from an imbalance in the thermoregulatory system due to insufficient heat dissipation. However, the body still struggles to dissipate heat, and the peripheral blood vessels dilate, causing a lot of sweating. In such a situation, even if you are inactive, within 1~2 hours, the human body will have a decrease in blood pressure due to a large loss of water and salt, and then symptoms such as dizziness (insufficient oxygen supply to the brain), weakness, and muscle cramps (caused by dehydration and salt loss) will appear. This is what we often think of as heat stroke.
Death Valley Image credit: Pixabay
More severe symptoms of heat stroke include heat exhaustion and heat stroke (severe heat stroke). People with heat exhaustion will have all the symptoms of heat stroke, but they are conscious and their body temperature is still within the normal range, so they can recover as long as they are rescued in time. However, in contrast, patients with heat stroke usually have a core temperature above 40°C and are more likely to have permanent organ damage and even death due to severe altered consciousness. Normal management includes moving to a cool place, cooling the person who is suffering from heat stroke, rehydrating or electrolyte water (moderate amounts in severe heat stroke, which may cause vomiting), and most importantly – medical help.
However, the approximately 600 residents who still live in Death Valley during the hottest months are better off than tourists. What's even more terrifying is that at this time, some residents of the Furnace Creek neighborhood in the park also jog outdoors – just imagine going out at 3~4 o'clock on the hottest day. They seem to be very strong and have thoroughly adapted to the harsh temperatures here.
In overcoming extreme heat
Formed by orogeny, Death Valley is surrounded by mountains, including the Badwater Basin, the lowest in North America, at 86 meters below sea level. The surrounding mountains block the monsoon rain, resulting in extremely dry and thermally conductive air, so direct sunlight causes the local surface temperature to rise more rapidly, and the low-lying terrain makes it difficult for hot air to flow, all of which contribute to the extreme heat here.
Even so, there is an abundance of plants and animals that feed the plants and further promote their survival by melting snow from the mountains. It has always been inhabited, and has been home to Native Americans for the past 1,000 years.
Badwater Basin Image Credit: Pixabay
On the afternoon of July 10, 1913, the U.S. Weather Service recorded a high temperature of 56.7°C in Furnace Creek, the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on the Earth's surface, measured by measuring the temperature of air 1.5 meters above the surface without direct sunlight. However, given its age, some experts are questioning how the temperature data was obtained and how accurate it is. However, even if this data is cancelled, Furnace Creek will still be tied with Kuwait (an Asian country) for the highest temperature on record with 54°C.
Today, Death Valley is a tourist destination marked by extreme heat, but it is far from the world and can embrace nature and tranquility. There is also a new group of permanent residents, who are usually employees of the National Park Service or local resorts, but also many temporary workers who come during the tourist season, including tour guides. So, how do they survive in such a hot area for so long? In the future, this may be a problem that many people need to think about or face.
According to local residents, apparently initially, they had to force their bodies to adapt. Usually, they need to go through a very uncomfortable period of time first, usually about a year. After that, their bodies seem to begin to recognize that their circumstances cannot be changed, and accept their current situation. And it is during this year that "natural selection" weeds out many people who are physically unable to adapt here.
Initially, people's bodies are not adapted to extreme heat, which can quickly overwhelm the body, leading to heavy sweating and exhaustion, followed by worse outcomes such as heat stroke. However, after a few weeks of recovery, most people's bodies begin to adjust, they sweat more, their core temperature decreases, and their blood vessels change to increase blood flow in the skin and heat dissipation.
Danger abounds
The community in Furnace Creek is equipped with modern facilities and has good access to electricity, communications and water, but once it is time to get out of the house (and at least an hour from here to the nearest town), residents need to prepare for it, as the high summer temperatures in Death Valley can make even simple activities dangerous. Leaving home alone, not bringing enough drinking water, and faulty means of communication or transport all increase the risk of people being threatened by heat or being trapped in a hot desert, and the risk of death can increase rapidly.
Lake Shiozawa in Death Valley Image Credit: Pixabay
Therefore, some residents often carry a spare satellite phone and enough drinking water when they go out to prevent their mobile phones from receiving the signal. According to some local residents, they rarely travel alone and often check their cars to avoid breaking down during their trips.
In the Furnace Creek community, most residents will have 2 types of air conditioners in their houses, one is a regular air conditioning unit and the other is an evaporative cooler (also known as a swamp cooler). The inside of the evaporative cooler is a wet pad that absorbs water, and when it draws in the hot air outside, the water on the wet pad will evaporate and absorb heat to cool the air, which in turn will cool the air entering the room. However, some residents don't know how to use air conditioning at all, so they let their bodies adapt to the heat (not recommended) while exercising.
Withered plants and animals in Death Valley Image credit: Pixabay
That's why they can form a group to run in the summer – an activity that has become an extreme sport. "We're definitely not going to let visitors go for a run in Death Valley in the summer." If you run every day (here) and your body is used to 48°C, a little bit higher (48.8°C) doesn't make much of a difference, according to one resident. Another resident said that she really felt comfortable here when the temperature was 26°C and she started to feel cold.
Extreme heat in multiple regions
In recent years, the average global temperature has been rising, and the number of hot days in Death Valley is also increasing, which is also greatly limiting the amount of time that local residents can spend outdoors. And in areas that would otherwise be more suitable for people, record-breaking heat is becoming more common. In the last week of May this year, northern India and Pakistan were hit by severe heatwaves, with temperatures rising above 50°C at one point. According to statistics, more than 31 cities in India reached 45°C during this period. On May 30, the temperature in Delhi, the capital of India, rose to 52.9°C, the highest temperature ever recorded in India.
Hundreds of people have died in India under such a continuous heat wave, and one of the key reasons is that there are no good cooling measures or no timely cooling. It is reported that a 40-year-old man in India was staying in a room without air conditioning and fans, and he eventually died of heatstroke. When doctors examined his body, they found that his body temperature had risen to 41°C.
In recent years, the number of extreme heat days on the mainland has also increased in June and July. According to the data of the National Climate Center, from June 21 to 24 last year, the high temperature weather in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and other places was extremely extreme, lasted for a long time, and had a wide range of high temperatures above 40°C, with a maximum value of 41.8°C, which was the strongest high temperature process in June in North China in the past 10 years. In July, the national average number of high temperature days (daily maximum temperature ≥ 35°C) was 5.4 days, and the daily maximum temperature of 12 national stations exceeded the historical maximum, and the highest daily temperature reached 48.7°C at Turpan Station in Xinjiang. This year's high temperature seems to have come earlier, from 6 a.m. on June 13 to 6 a.m. on June 14, a total of 510 stations across the country experienced high temperatures of more than 40°C.
Researchers from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom published a study in the journal Nature Communications in 2023, according to the official account "Research Circle". Using a generalized extreme distribution to fit historical meteorological data records from 1959 to 2021, they found that over the past 60 years, 31% of the world's regional daily maximum temperature records exceeded theoretical extremes and were in the anomalous range. To make matters worse, many parts of the world, including the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Bohai Rim region, are at risk of more extreme heatwaves than ever before.
If we are inevitably going to face increasing heat and heat waves, perhaps the best thing to do is to improve our physical performance, as well as avoid spending too much time in the heat, and avoid too much physical activity in the heat.
Source: Popular Science China