Living in South Australia, the hottest and driest of Australia’s six states, and feeling the brunt of the region’s increasingly intense seasonal heat waves, local researchers wanted to know more about the impact of our warming world on human sleeping patterns.
In late January, the South Australian city of Adelaide endured its hottest night on record, with thermometers still measuring temperatures of 34.1 degrees Celsius (about 93 degrees Fahrenheit) just before 7 am. Such sweltering nighttime conditions have long been linked to a greater risk of hospitalization for everything from cardiovascular to mental health conditions. “We started wondering whether some of this could be explained by loss of sleep or