A long swath of states could see explosive temperatures by the year 2053.

As climate change worsens around the world, areas that were previously not subject to particularly high temperatures in the summer time have been seeing exponentially rising temperatures in recent years. According to a team of researchers from the nonprofit First Street Foundation, if the climate crisis is not addressed soon, then by the year 2053, a large swath of the United States could see these kinds of temperatures on a regular basis.

Based on climate projections and location data, the researchers have determined that a vertical line of US states, stretching from Lousiana to Illinois, could become home to an “extreme heat belt” within the next 30 years. States within this belt could see recurring days with temperatures up to and over 125 degrees Fahrenheit which, for reference, is around the typical temperature seen in California’s Death Valley in the middle of summer.

“How far north it stretched — I think a lot of people just hearing southern Wisconsin, Chicago and those areas being part of the extreme heat belt is surprising,” said Jeremy Porter, First Street Foundation’s chief research officer and a professor and the director of quantitative methods in social sciences at the City University of New York.

“If there are hot spots and dry spells in these places, farmers will have to shift their priorities and what types of crops they’ll plant, and that will all have a lot of long-term consequences,” said Noboru Nakamura, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, unaffiliated with First Street.

“If a certain fraction of days per year are over 100 degrees, then unless you have the resources and infrastructure to stay cool, then it makes certain places very difficult to survive,” Nakamura said. “I can certainly envision that would shake up peoples’ decisions about where to live.”