Death Valley is a desert basin in eastern California, lying in the northern Mojave Desert between the Amargosa Range and the Panamint Range. Covering roughly 3,000 square miles, it forms the centrepiece of Death Valley National Park and holds the record for the highest reliable air temperature measured on Earth.
On 16 August 2020 and again on 9 July 2021, instruments at Furnace Creek recorded 54.4 °C (130 °F), the highest confirmed global surface reading. An earlier 1913 measurement of 56.7 °C remains disputed by modern climatologists. The valley sits at the meeting point of the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, east of the Sierra Nevada, with elevations ranging from below sea level on the basin floor to 3,366 metres at Telescope Peak. The Timbisha people have lived here for more than a thousand years; their name for the valley, Tümpisa, means “rock paint” and refers to red ochre deposits. European-American settlers gave it its current name during the California gold rush winter of 1849–1850, when a party of prospectors became lost and feared they would die—though only one member perished before the group escaped.
