Dasht-i Lut

The Lut Desert, widely referred to as Dasht-e Lut (, "Emptiness Plain"), is a salt desert located in the provinces of Kerman and Sistan-Baluchestan, Iran. It is the world's 33rd-largest desert, and was included in UNESCO's World Heritage List on July 17, 2016.

TThe name is derived from ''Lut'' which means 'bare, empty' in Persian and ''dasht'' which means 'plain' in Persian.

The surface of its sand has been measured at temperatures as high as 70.7 °C (159.3 °F), the highest-known land surface temperature.

Description

Iran is climatically part of the Afro-Asian belt of deserts, which stretches from Mauritania all the way to Mongolia.

Iran's geography consists of a plateau surrounded by mountains and divided into drainage basins. Dasht-e Lut is one of the largest of these drainage basins, long and wide,

The area of the desert is about ,
the largest in Iran after Dasht-e Kavir. During the spring wet season, water briefly flows down from the Kerman mountains, but it soon dries up, leaving behind only rocks, sand, and salt.

The eastern part of Dasht-e Lut is a low plateau covered with salt flats with lowest elevations around 110 m above sea level (30.398609 N, 58.493041 E). In contrast, the center has been sculpted by the wind into a series of parallel ridges and furrows, extending over and reaching in height. This area is also riddled with ravines and sinkholes. The southeast is a vast expanse of sand, like a Saharan erg, with dunes high, among the tallest in the world.

Geology

According to one study, more than half of the desert's surface is covered by volcanic rocks. Evaporites can be observed during hot periods.

Archaeology

Around 2500 BC, a flourishing civilization existed in this area. The ancient city of Shahdad was located on the western edge of the Lut desert. And on the eastern side, there was a large, 200 ha (490 acres), ancient city today called Shahr-e Sukhteh or Burnt City, on the former, now dry, Helmand River.

The Lut area is an important region for Iranian archaeology. Recently, an extensive archaeological survey was conducted on the eastern flank of Kerman range and close to the western fringes of Lut Desert. As a result, eighty-seven ancient sites dating from the fifth millennium BC to the late Islamic era were identified. Twenty-three of these sites are assigned to the Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age.

Climate

The hottest land surface on Earth recorded by the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer installed on NASA's Aqua satellite from 2003 to 2010 was in Dasht-e Lut, with land surface temperatures reaching in 2005, although the air temperature at that time could have be anywhere from . The precision of these measurements was between 0.5  K and 1 K. In 2019, authors reported a land surface temperature of , based on newer MODIS data.

As of 2020, there are no permanent weather stations in Dasht-e Lut, which makes the exact climate uncertain. Based on neighboring stations, Dasht-e Lut likely receives less than of precipitation a year. In comparison, the Atacama Desert receives an average of of precipitation per year, with some areas receiving as little as a year.

See also

* Dasht-e Kavir
*Geography of Iran
* International rankings of Iran

Further reading

* Sykes, Percy.
A History of Persia
'. Macmillan and Company: London (1921). pp. 60–62.

References

External links

* "Hottest Place on Earth" spoken article

NASA image and info

NASA survey on temperatures around the globe

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Deserts of Iran
Ergs
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World Heritage Sites in Iran
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