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?

  • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    You couldn’t physically drink enough water. Math is not my strong suit but this seems pretty straightforward.

    It takes one calorie to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius, by definition. Plugging in some numbers (a liter of water starting at a very frosty 1 C) takes almost 40 kilocalories or about 160 kiloJoules of energy. That’s like half of your “simply existing” calories per hour, so you’d need to consume 2 liters of ice-cold water every hour (and excrete every gram of it to 40, which you aren’t doing with your living body) just to break even.

    It gets more complicated when you factor in evaporative cooling and I already said I’m not a math-man but the environmental factor is simply too strong for biology.