Name: Hotter Than Death Valley | Weird Places
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T03:31:46.000Z
Duration: 6 min 37 s
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Learn more Hottest region on Earth is in Eastern Africa, but the heat might be the least interesting thing about it.

It has a volcano featuring one of the planet's few lava lakes, places where molten rock sits exposed full time, and it has some of the Earth's hottest saltiest and most acidic natural water.

But hominids like US humans, have lived nearby for millions of years, including one whose skeleton is so famous.

Kill Depression, home to all of the extremes and tow Lucy.

Thanks to its super arid desert climate, the Don Nickell depression is so dry that major rivers just dry up there without ever reaching the sea.

Death Valley California might have the hottest verified days on record, but on average over the whole year, Donna Kill is hotter than anywhere else on Earth, and it's not even like a close contest.

Measurements show that on average, Donna Kill is about 34 degrees Celsius.

That's a couple degrees hotter than anywhere else on Earth and at least nine degrees hotter than Death Valley.

But here, heat doesn't just come from the sun.

It's called the Donna Kill Depression because it's a lower than everything else around at around 125 meters below sea level.

It's so low because Donna Kill is the junction of three tectonic plates the Nubian, the Somalian and the Arabian.

And those plates are spreading apart, leaving the region between them to sink lower and lower.

And just like everything else with this area, the Don ical depression isn't your average plate boundary.

Underneath eastern Africa, there's what's known as a mantle plume.

A huge mass of magma from within the Earth's mantle is being shoved up against the crust for reasons that scientists don't fully understand.

That plume is helping push those plates apart, and as a result, the Somalian and Nubian plates, which used to be a single plate, will completely split right near Donna Kill.

This means that the Donna kill depression is one of the few places on earth where scientists can watch the kinds of processes that might have formed Earth's first plates billions of years ago.

the region experiences lots of earthquakes and hosts its own share of volcanoes, all evidence of the chaos brewing under the crust and the Don Nickell depressions Volcanoes work together with its rocks to make the region look pretty different from your classic monochrome sandy deserts.

A hard cracked ground is sometimes surprisingly colorful, where the little water that's available mixes with iron and copper and sulfur from volcanoes and salt from the rocks to produce a rainbow that you would not want to swim in.

That water is about as acidic as battery acid at 10 times as bad as the acid in your stomach uses to kill bacteria.

And it's heated to around boiling by all that magma beneath the surface.

And by the way, the air's not much better in some spots.

It has so much chlorine in it that it will burn your throat if you don't wear a gas mask.

But remarkably, even here, scientists have found a kind of life called extremophiles, microbes adapted to thrive and what we would usually think of as inhospitable environments.

And they haven't found one type of extreme a file.

There are at least a couple hardy little organisms there, and they're tolerant to so many different extreme conditions that they're not just extremophiles.

Now, what you won't find in the don ical depression today is many larger organisms because it's honestly ah, pretty unpleasant place, what with the ultra hot days and the throat corroding air in the pools of boiling acid, although humans do visit sometimes.

In 1974 a team of scientists in the area stumbled upon the partial skeleton of a kind of hominid who used to live there, called Australopithecus afarensis.

That night, they were listening to the Beatles and thought of the perfect name for their discovery.

Lucy hominids include every species related to humans since we split from the African apes several 1,000,000 years ago.

Lucy lived a little more than three million years ago, and when they found her, she was the oldest, most complete early hominid ever discovered.

Lucy helped us write the story of hominid evolution, helping to answer tons of questions while also inspiring lots of new ones.

Despite her fame, we still don't know exactly where she and her closest relatives sit on our family tree.

But we do know is that when Lucy was around, the Donna kill Depression did not look like it does.

It's special combination of heat plate tectonics, elevation acid and volcanism probably only kicked into high gear about a century ago and won't last forever, either.

Millions of years from now, the African and Arabian plates will have spread far enough apart, but the nearby Red Sea will be able to flow right into the depression they're currently creating, and a brand new ocean will sit where Lucy once climbed.

Right now, we get to be on Earth when this incredibly weird, unique place exists for us to see and talk about or, if not lucky like were something humans really love knowing about stuff.

And that's what drives us to study even remote, unforgiving places like this one.

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