It's so hot in South Korea that potatoes are boiling in the ground — and Japan has introduced 'cruelly hot day' as a new weather category

To date, the heat wave has been blamed for 31 human deaths along with over 900,000 livestock and 1.4 million farmed fish. Even potato farmers are feeling the impact. In a farm region 80 miles outside of Seoul, farmers say the potatoes came out of the ground soft and collapsing “like boiled potatoes” as the sun heated the ground.

Cruelly hot

Things aren’t much better in Japan, where the country’s weather agency has had to devise a new term for temperatures that top 40 degrees Celsius (104F). That designation—“kokushobi” or “cruelly hot day”—was used for the first time this year. It’s so hot that three lions died of heatstroke at a Tokyo zoo.

The intense heat has also complicated recovery efforts in the Kumamoto Prefecture in southern Japan, where a 7.1-magnitude earthquake last month killed at least 39 people and injured 170. Over 40,000 households in that area still lack water and thousands of people are sleeping in shelters or their cars in case of aftershocks. Some of those people are dying of heat stroke because of the extreme temperatures.

Hong Kong, meanwhile, posted its highest temperature since 1884 recently, topping 98 degrees. That’s nine degrees above the typical average this time of year.

Scientists say the record highs would be “virtually impossible” without global warming. Without that, they say a heatwave of this magnitude would occur once every 10,000 years.

Not just Asia

The extreme heat isn’t limited to Asian countries. Spain is expected to top 104 degrees on Thursday, and London and Paris are both expecting temperatures north of 100 degrees.

That will be the fifth heat wave of the year for Europe. The extreme temperatures have sparked wildfires, caused water shortages and taken a toll on tourism, which many cities depend on at this time of year. (The majority of France is currently under some form of water use restrictions.)