Furnace Creek
So-named for the location of the hottest temperature recorded on Baseline. The breach opens onto a baked clay landscape, stretching to the horizon, where, at the time of initial exploration, an oversized orange sun was beginning to set. This created a few hours where the ambient temperature plummeted to a frosty 120F or so, and a short expedition in a sealed and air-conditioned vehicle was mounted, beneath the light of a moon barely a third its current visible diameter. The sighting of the skeleton of an immense sea-beast generated some excitement. Sample cores showed encapsulated extremophile microorganisms.
When the expedition returned and data was analyzed, the tentative hypothesis was this was an Earth variant in some far future timeline where the sun had begun its march towards red giant-hood. The breathable atmosphere and the traces of water vapor gave hope there may be pockets of life still, but as the breach site was on a former continental shelf somewhere around 55 degrees latitude, and was still uninhabitally hot, the cost of seeking out such oases was deemed prohibitive for the time being. (The possibility of easily accessible minerals normally found only under thousands of feet of water generated some buzz among BREACH's industrial sponsors, but again, the present costs were too high.)
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