Dasht-e Lut

Location within Iran

University of Montana scientists found Iran's Lut Desert reached the hottest temperature of anywhere on Earth between 2003 and 2009.

As seen from space

Map of biotopes of Iran

  Forest steppe

  Forests and woodlands

  Semi-desert

  Desert lowlands

  Steppe

  Salted alluvial marshes

Dasht-e Lut, also spelled Dasht-i-Lut and known as the Lut Desert, is a large salt desert in southeastern Iran and is the world's 25th largest desert. It has been ranked the hottest place on earth at nearly 70.7 degrees C (159-160 degrees F), and is one of the world's driest places.

Description[link]

Iran is climatically part of the Afro-Asian belt of deserts that stretch from the Cape Verde islands off West Africa all the way to Mongolia near Beijing, China. The patchy, elongated, light-colored feature in the foreground (parallel to the mountain range) is the northernmost of the Dasht dry lakes that stretch southward 300 kilometers (190 mi). In near-tropical deserts, elevated areas capture most precipitation. As a result an abiotic zone.

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 desert basins, 480 kilometers (300 mi) long and 320 kilometers (200 mi) wide,^[1] and is considered to be one of the driest places on Earth.^[2][3][4]

Area of the desert is about 51,800 square kilometers (20,000 mi²).^[5] The other large basin is the 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. In contrast, the center has been sculpted by the wind into a series of parallel ridges and furrows, extending over 150 km (93 mi) and reaching 75 m (250 ft) in height.^[1] This area is also riddled with ravines and sinkholes. The southeast is a vast expanse of sand, like a Saharan erg, with dunes 300 m (1000 ft) high, among the tallest in the world.^[1]

Hottest land surface[link]

Measurements of MODIS (Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) installed on NASA's satellite "Aqua" from 2003 - 2005 testify that the hottest land surface on Earth is located in Dasht-e Lut and land surface temperatures reach here 70.7 degrees C (159-160 degrees F)^{[6][7][8][9][2][3][4]}. Precision of measurements is 0.5 - 1 degrees K^[10][11].

The hottest part of Dasht-e Lut is Gandom Beryan, a large plateau covered in dark lava, approximately 480 km² in area.^[12]. According to a local legend, the name (in translation from Persian - "Toasted wheat") originates from an accident where a load of wheat was left in the desert and was eventually scorched by the heat in a few days time^[13].

See also[link]

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

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c} editors, Richard L. Scheffel, Susan J. Wernert ; writers, Oliver E. Allen ... et al. (1980). Natural Wonders of the World. The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.. p. 117. ISBN 978-0-89577-087-5. 
2. ^ ^{a b} http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1102/p16s01-sten.html
3. ^ ^{a b} http://www.universetoday.com/guide-to-space/earth/temperature-of-earth/
4. ^ ^{a b} http://www.redorbit.com/images/images-of-the-day/img/13205/hottest_spot_on_earth/index.html
5. ^ Wright, John W. (ed.) (2006). The New York Times Almanac (2007 ed.). New York, New York: Penguin Books. p. 456. ISBN 978-0-14-303820-7. 
6. ^ http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7149
7. ^ http://www.weather.ir/english/
8. ^ http://www.climatetemp.info/iran/
9. ^ http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=58252&sectionid=351020108
10. ^ http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataprod/dataproducts.php?MOD_NUMBER=11 MOD 11 - Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity, MODIS Website
11. ^ http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/atbd/atbd_mod11.pdf Zhengming Wan, MODIS Land-Surface Temperature Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (LST ATBD) Version 3.3. April 1999
12. ^ http://www.iranreview.org/content/view/1067/51/ A Journey To Earth's Hottest Point
13. ^ Gandom Beryan in Lut Desert - hottest place on Earth. Wondermondo. 1 November 2010. http://www.wondermondo.com/Countries/As/Iran/Kerman/GandomBeryan.htm 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Dasht-e Lut

• NASA image and info
• NASA survey on temperatures around the globe

Coordinates: 30°36′18″N 59°04′04″E / 30.60500001°N 59.0677777878°E / 30.60500001; 59.0677777878

Gustave Doré's engraving of Lot's flight from his people

Lot (Arabic: لوط‎, Lut) is an apostle and prophet of God in the Quran.^[1][2] He also appears in the Bible, but the Biblical stories of Lot are not entirely accepted within Islam. According to Islamic tradition, Lot lived in Ur and was the son of Haran and nephew of Abraham.^[3] He migrated with Abraham to Canaan in Palestine. He was commissioned as a prophet to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.^[4] His story is used as a reference by Muslims to demonstrate Islam's disapproval of homosexuality. He was commanded by God to go to the land of Sodom and Gomorrah to preach to his people on monotheism and to stop them from their lustful and violent acts.^[3] According to both the Qur'an and the Hebrew Bible, Lot's messages were ignored by the inhabitants and Sodom and Gomorrah were subsequently destroyed. They cannot be exactly located, but it may be supposed that they were somewhere in the plain cast of the Dead Sea. The story of their destruction is told in the 19th chapter of Genesis. Two angels in the shape of handsome young men came to Lot in the evening and became his guests by night. The inhabitants of Sodom in their lust for unnatural crime invaded Lut's house but were repulsed. In the morning, the angels warned Lut to escape with his family. "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt." (Gen. 19:24–26). Note that Lut's people are the people to whom he is sent on a mission. He was not one of their own brethren, as was Salih or Shu'aib. But he looked upon his people as his brethren (50:13), as a man of God always does."</ref> is that the Biblical version includes the story of Lot being induced to incestuous relations with his own daughters. The Qur'an says that Lot is a prophet, and holds that all prophets were examples of moral and spiritual rectitude. Though it is not altogether clear in the Bible story that Lot consented to his action, in Islam these stories of incest are considered to be false.^[3]

Context in the Quran[link]

The narrative of Lot occupies a relatively large space in the Quran.^[3] Most of these passages place the narrative of Lot in a line of successive prophets including Noah, Hud, Saleh and Shoaib. Scholars have, in the past stated, that these particular prophets represent the early cycle of prophecy as described in the Qur'an^[5]: The prophet would be sent to his community; the community would pay no attention to his warning and would instead threaten him with punishment; after years of preaching, God would ask the prophet to leave his community and his people would be subsequently destroyed in a punishment. Scholars interpret the listing of the five prophets to be chronological, with Noah being the only prophet in the list who preached before the Great Flood. Lot is also mentioned alongside Ishmael, Elisha and Jonah as men whom God favored above the nations.^[6]

Narrative in Islam[link]

According to the Quran, Lot was a prophet and a nephew of Abraham. A group of angels visited Abraham as guests^[7] and gave him glad tidings of a son "endowed with wisdom",^[8] they told him that they had been sent by God to the "guilty people"^[9] of Lot^[10] to destroy them^[11]with "a shower of stones of clay"^[12] and deliver Lot and those who believed in him, except his wife saying "she is of those who lag behind".^[13][14] The Qur'an also draws upon Lot's wife as an "example for the unbelievers" as she was married to a righteous man but cheated him by not believing in his message and was thus condemned to Hell.^[15]

The people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities which Lot was sent to with God's message, transgressed consciously against the bounds of God. Their avarice led to inhospitality and robbery, which in turn led to the humiliation of strangers by mistreatment and rape. It was their abominable sin of homosexuality which was seen as symptomatic of their attitudes,^[16][17] and upon Lot's exhorting them to abandon their transgression against God, they ridiculed him,^[18] threatening with dire consequences;^[19] Lot only prayed to God to be saved from doing as they did.^[20]

Then three angels in the disguise of handsome young boys came to Lot, who became distressed knowing the character of the people, and feeling himself powerless to protect the visitors; he said: "This is a distressful day."^[21] When the people – overjoyed at the news of new young boys in the village – came to snatch them away from Lot,^[22] he tried to convince them to refrain from practising their lusts on the visitors, and offered his own daughters to them (to marry, according to the translation of Abdullah Yusuf Ali) in return for the boys' free release,^[23][24] but they were unrelenting and replied "we have no need of your daughters: indeed you know quite well what we want!"^[25] The Qur'an remarks "... they moved blindly in the frenzy of approaching death".^[26]

Lot was powerless to protect the boys, but they revealed to him that they were indeed angels sent by God to punish the people for their transgressions. They advised Lot to leave the place during the night and not look back, informing him that his wife would be left behind on account of her sinful nature and that they "...were about to bring down upon the folk of this township a fury from the sky because they are evil-doers".^[5] Keeping his faith in God, Lot left his home and the cities during the night with his family and others who believed in him, and only his wife stayed behind. When morning came, God turned the cities upside down, and rained down on them stones hard as baked clay,^[27] putting an end to the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah once and for all.

Monument[link]

Bani Na'im houses the tomb of the prophet Lot in the center of the town. The tomb is located within a rectangular mosque with an inner court and minaret. Lot's tomb is first mentioned by catholic scholar Saint Jerome of Jerusalem in the 4th century CE.^[28] The tomb of his daughters are on an opposite hill nearby. To the southeast of Bani Na'im is a shrine dedicated to Lot, known as Maqam an-Nabi Yatin ("Shrine of the Truthful Prophet"). Local legend claims Lot prayed at the site and imprints of his feet in a rock there are visible. According to Muslim legend and Catholic tradition, Bani Na'im is the place where the patriarch Abraham, after the departure of the angels, saw the smoke of Sodom and Gomorrah rising as the smoke of a furnace.

References in the Qur'an[link]

Note: There are many references to Lot in the Qur'an. The following are some of them.

• Lot's prophecy: Quran 26:161, 7:80–84, 15:67–77, 26:160–168, 29:28–31
• Angels appear to Lot: Quran 11:77–80, 15:61–66
• Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: Quran 11:82, 26:169–175, 27:54–58
• Lot's wife: Quran 11:81, 15:60, 29:32
• Praise for Lot: Quran 37:133–138, 54:35

See also[link]

• Book of Genesis
• Biblical narratives and the Qur'an
• Legends and the Qur'an
• Prophets of Islam
• Stories of The Prophets

References[link]