Stretching across 7,000 square miles of southeastern Iran, the Lut Desert (Dasht-e Lūt) is a landscape of extremes. The salt desert is notable for its rich variety of landforms and some of the world’s tallest sand dunes. It is also one of the hottest places on Earth.
In Persian, “lut” refers to bare land devoid of water or vegetation. Mountains surrounding the desert form a rain shadow that keeps the region hyper-arid. Wind, heat, and lack of rain have shaped the desert’s sand and rocks into several types of landforms, visible in this image acquired in April 2024 by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
Between June and October every year, intense winds blow from the northwest and carve into the bedrock of the Lut Desert. These winds propel sand grains at high speeds, sandblasting the rock and forming corrugated ridges known as yardangs. The deep troughs and ridges of yardangs can be seen on the left (west) side of this image, oriented parallel to the prevailing wind. Lut contains some of the best examples of wind-eroded yardangs, according to the UNESCO World Heritage Convention.
The eastern and southern portions of the Lut Desert contain large rust-colored sand seas. Wind sweeps this sand into dunes. Many are linear, but some are shaped like a crescent, a star, or a funnel. Over time, some of the world’s tallest dunes have developed here, reaching up to 470 meters (1,500 feet) above the desert floor.
Sand in Lut has been blackened by volcanic lava, making it heat-absorbing, and its mountain-surrounded terrain limits air movement. In a study using 18 years of MODIS land surface temperature data, the Lut Desert ranked as having the hottest surface on Earth, tied with the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. As opposed to air temperatures, which are measured 1.5 to 2 meters above the ground, land surface temperatures reflect the heat on a parcel of ground. The analysis measured land surface temperatures from 2002 to 2019 around the world and found that MODIS recorded the hottest temperatures of 80.8°C (177.4°F) in both the Sonoran and Lut deserts.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Emily Cassidy.
