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Record-breaking heat events over the past century show how extreme heat is reshaping weather, infrastructure, and public health across the globe
The number on a thermometer is rarely the whole story. Death Valley hit 134 degrees Fahrenheit in 1913. Lytton, British Columbia broke Canada's heat record by nearly five degrees Celsius in 2021. In both cases, the reading itself was only the headline.
What these record-breaking heat events exposed was something deeper. They showed how the atmosphere, the oceans, and human infrastructure respond when heat pushes past what a place, a body, or a power grid was built to handle. Some events changed how meteorologists verify a claim. A supposed world record in Libya turned out to rest on a flawed 1922 reading, and was formally withdrawn 90 years later.
Other events changed public health policy outright. Europe's 2003 heat wave killed close to 70,000 people. It forced French officials to build an early-warning system that had never existed before. A few events revealed limits nobody had tested. Wet-bulb temperature readings in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates came close to the point beyond which the human body can no longer cool itself.
