#Death Valley reaches 130 degrees, potentially Earth’s highest temperature

Death Valley more than lived up to its name Sunday, when the mercury at the aptly named village of Furnace Creek soared to a scorching 130 degrees – possibly the highest recorded temperature on Earth, according to a report.

The sizzling reading was reached at 3:41 p.m. amid a historic heat wave in the West, according to the National Weather Service. If verified, it would break Death Valley’s previous August record by three degrees, the Washington Post reported.

It also would be among the top-three highest temps ever measured on Earth at any time — and may, in fact, be the highest, according to the newspaper.

“Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that is a legitimate observation,” Randy Cerveny, who leads the World Meteorological Organization’s weather and climate extremes team, told the Washington Post in an email.

“I am recommending that the World Meteorological Organization preliminarily accept the observation. In the upcoming weeks, we will, of course, be examining it in detail, along with the U.S. National Climate Extremes Committee, using one of our international evaluation teams,” Cerven added.

Caroline Rohe, a park ranger at the Death Valley National Park, posted a photo of the stratospheric reading on a thermometer at the visitor center.

“Could be a world record temperature! We hit 130 degrees today at Death Valley. (The visitor center thermometer runs 3-4 degrees warmer.),” she wrote.

The desert in Eastern California holds the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet — 134 degrees, which the US Weather Bureau recorded on July 10, 1913, at Furnace Creek.

However, that measurement remains in hot dispute.

In 2016, Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data, concluded that it was “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective,” the news outlet reported.

Some experts believed that the 129 degrees recorded in Death Valley on June 30, 2013, and in Kuwait and Pakistan in 2016 and 2017, respectively, are the highest ever reliably measured on Earth.

If the 130 degrees recorded Sunday is confirmed, it would be the highest temperature officially recorded on the planet since 1931, and the third-highest since 1873, according to the Washington Post.

The only two higher one include the 1913 reading in Death Valley and a 131-degree mark from Kebili, Tunisia, from July 7, 1931, which also has “serious credibility issues,” Burt told the paper.

Furnace Creek, which sits at 190 feet below sea level in the Mojave Desert, is notorious for its searing heat.

In July 2018, its average temperature of 108.1 degrees made it the hottest month ever measured on Earth. During that month, it hit at least 120 degrees for three weeks.