Day 486, Part 3: We've Broken The Planet.

Death Valley this weekend:

• Official Reading, 130 degrees Fahrenheit today, 129 yesterday, 130 Friday.
• There is an unofficial thermometer at the visitors' center.  It read 134 today.  (The thermometer is not counted toward the official world record.)
• It read 135 (57 Celsius) yesterday -- which is the hottest temperature ever recorded at that unofficial thermometer.  (This is actually one degree warmer than the world record, set at Death Valley in 1913 at 134.)
• But even more frightening:  A park ranger took a ground reading, not dissimilar to that thermometer a couple weeks back at the Track and Field trials.
• It came back with a surface temperature outside the visitors' center of ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-EIGHT DEGREES FAHRENHEIT (81 C).  Just 34 degrees short of BOILING.
• It was so hot on the ground that one visitor actually tested whether you could cook an egg on the ground.  Park rangers ordered her to clean it up, just as it appeared the answer was YES....