Dust Bowl, No AC, and 121°F: The Summer That Killed 5,000 Americans Still Holds the Records

Ninety years ago this summer, the United States baked under the most extreme heat wave in modern North American history. Beginning in the summer of 1936, temperatures surged from the Southern Plains through the Midwest and into the Northeast, killing an estimated 5,000 people and setting state temperature records that remain unbroken to this day. The summer of 1936 was the hottest on record in the United States since recordkeeping began in 1895, a distinction it held for 85 years until 2021.

What Made 1936 So Extreme

The heat wave arrived after one of the coldest winters on record across the same region. The Chesapeake Bay froze completely. Snowdrifts in Iowa buried locomotives whole. Then, almost without warning, spring turned hot and dry.

The conditions were set in motion by unusual warmth in the Pacific Ocean, from the Gulf of Alaska south to Los Angeles, combined with warming in the Bay of Fundy between Maine and Nova Scotia. Researchers at the University of New South Wales determined in 2015 that these ocean temperatures reduced spring rainfall and created conditions for catastrophic heat to build across the country’s interior.