Doctors warn there are biological limits to temperatures we can survive, and exposure to extreme heat can provoke a heart attack

Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.

At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.

At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.

In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.

Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?

    • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
      3·
      24 hours ago

      I like the idea that it’s hard to boil water, but easy to find a person whose body temperature is exactly the same as the reference point.

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      As a temperature that could be consistently referenced with then-modern technology, yeah. You’d have to control a lot of factors to make sure it’s not any hotter than it necessarily needs to be.

      • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        You’d have to control a lot of factors to make sure it’s not any hotter than it necessarily needs to be.

        Uh… if you can get liquid water hotter than 100°C without adding other substances or pressure you should go claim your Nobel prize or wizard robe.

        • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          10 hours ago

          Today we casually say “100 °C at 1 atm,” but in Fahrenheit’s time, controlling or even measuring atmospheric pressure was hard. Boiling water on different days could still get different temperatures because the air pressure was different that day or at that location. They also only had alcohol-based thermometers, maybe some early mercury ones… it wasn’t easy to measure reliably.

          Boiling point drops ~0.5 °C per 150 meters of elevation, or something to that effect. It was unreliable for big science when the goal is lab-friendly anchor points.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      23 hours ago

      Boiling water is full of pockets of steam that may be higher than 100C, and will have cold spots too. It’s really not very easy at all to get any quantity of water to 100C stably and consistently throughout. Not easy enough to be a foundational reference, with the tools of a century or two ago. Boiling is also sensitive to altitude and pressure changes, and may be shifted slightly based on the mineral content of the water. It is in fact not dead simple.

      • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        21 hours ago

        Boiling water is full of pockets of steam that may be higher than 100C, and will have cold spots too.

        No it won’t, who told you that? That’s not how thermodynamics works

            • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              6 hours ago

              You think every molecule in a pot of boiling water is at exactly the same temperature? Of course there are variations throughout. You don’t need to invoke the fundamental laws of the universe to figure that out.