Extreme Environments: reading informational text; Extreme Weather around the World 3

Extreme Weather around the World

1. Have you ever heard someone complain about the weather? It’s always either too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, and so on. It seems that we only get a few days a year when the weather is “just right”. But really, all of these complaints seem silly when thinking about the world’s extreme climates.

Extremely Hot

2. Is the harsh, scorching heat making your sandals sweaty? Well, in Dallol, Ethiopia, your shoes could melt if you stand still for a few minutes. Dallol is officially the hottest inhabited place on Earth. It’s part of a desert region that is below sea level. In addition, Dallol sits on top of a volcano. The intense heat
   evaporates
   most of the water that flows into the area, leaving large salt slabs behind. The Afar people of Dallol harvest this salt to sell at local markets.

Extremely Cold

3. You don’t know cold unless you’ve been to Oymyakon, Russia. This village is located far to the north in an area called the Sakha Republic. It has the honor of being one of the coldest places in the world where people live year-round. Yet, the word “cold” barely describes it. Try “freeze your eyeballs frigid”. Oymyakon’s temperatures dip far below freezing. Its dwellers have to wear goggles to protect their eyes from very strong winds and severely cold temperatures. The land is mostly inhospitable to farming crops. So the locals eat mainly meat and canned foods brought in from other towns.

Extremely Dry

4. Make sure to hug your umbrella the next time you see it. Some areas of Chile’s Atacama desert in South America haven’t seen rain in 400 years. People get water for crops and for drinking by “harvesting” clouds, instead of depending on precipitation. When the fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean, they collect moisture with plastic sheets that drip into pans underneath.

Extremely Wet

5. Your picnic got rained out? Absorb this: in Mawsynram, India, it basically always rains. The jungle village gets enough yearly rain to cover a three-story building. To cope with the steady rainfall, villagers have come up with some clever solutions. They use grass to soundproof their roofs from the constant noise of heavy rain. Outdoor workers rely on traditional knups to keep them dry. Woven with bamboo, grasses, and banana leaves, and worn over the head and back, these coverings look like turtle shells.
6. No matter what your personal weather peeve is, there’s always a way to make the best of it. As the saying goes, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.” People who live in the world's most intense environments realize that you’ve got to adapt to the climate you’ve got.

Practice Question