Death Valley now the hottest spot in the world It's official:
California's famed Death Valley now holds the world record for
the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. One of weather's
most iconic and hallowed statistics, the Earth's all-time
warmest temperature -- supposedly set 90 years ago today at a
remote spot in the Libyan desert -- has been deemed invalid: New
analysis of past weather data found that record of 136 degrees
to be incorrect. The new record, which was formerly No. 2 on the
all-time list: the beastly 134-degree reading measured on July
10, 1913, in Death Valley, Calif. "This is as symbolic a mark
for meteorologists as Mount Everest is for geographers," said
Christopher Burt, a weather historian with the Weather
Underground, a private meteorology company. The Libyan record
from 1922 was determined to be invalid because of the
combination of a poor weather instrument, a location in a bad
spot for accurate readings and an inexperienced record-keeper.
Based on these findings, an internatio