Walking on hot red sand is hard work, especially when the temperature exceeds 40°C (104°F). After about 40 minutes you are soaked, dehydrated and exhausted. It is hard to imagine doing this for 40 days with all your gear, including 40 liters of water for five days, on a two-wheeled trolley. But that is exactly what my traveling companions did.
I'm in the Nahud Desert, a vast expanse of sand and rocky wilderness in northern Saudi Arabia, to experience the almost unbearable heat and meet up with 20 other people who are part of an expedition. Deep ClimateHe is dedicated to understanding how humans respond to extreme situations. “The aim is to study how humans adapt to new kinds of environments,” he says. Christian Clotteleader of the expedition and director of the French Institute of Human Adaptation.
This problem becomes even more pressing as the climate gets warmer: even in the most optimistic scenarios, heatwaves exceeding 40°C, as observed in southern Europe and across the United States over the past few months, will become the norm in many parts of the world.
So the question of what happens to our brains and bodies, and how well the human physiology can handle extreme heat, is a question that matters to millions of people. “We're going to see large swaths of densely populated areas rise to unprecedented temperatures that nobody has seen in historical climates,” he said. Tim Renton He is a researcher at the University of Exeter in the UK and recently co-authored a research paper titled “…
Source: www.newscientist.com
