It’s the world’s 33rd-largest desert, but the hottest spot anywhere. That’s according to famed Iranian geographer, the late Parviz Kordovani.
In fact, Kordovani, who studied desert civil engineering in Germany, espoused that even bacteria couldn’t survive on the surface of Lut Desert.
Teams he had dispatched to locations in the desert for sampling found no signs of life, not even bacteria.
As head of the Geography Department in Tehran University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kordovani spent five years studying the desert in collaboration with the Sorbonne University.
He found that the temperature there, even in the shades, exceeded 65 degrees Celsius.
His study also found that in the Lut’s center, an area 150 kilometers in width and 200 kilometers in length, no plants or even bacteria existed.
