A woman takes pictures of a thermometer reading 40 degrees Celsius in Seville, Spain, on Sunday. Marcelo del Pozo/Getty Images
The soaring temperatures are caused by a heat dome — a vast area of stagnant high pressure parked over swaths of Europe, which acts like a lid on a pot, stubbornly trapping heat.
It supresses clouds and allows sunshine to bake the ground.
Heat domes are not unusual for the continent over the summer, but the temperatures — and the margin by which records will be broken — are, scientists say.
Temperatures in parts of Western Europe are running at around 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 Celsius) above normal for this time of year.
The extreme heat has been supercharged by global warming, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, which raises the background temperature, making every heat wave more intense.
Europe is the planet’s fastest warming continent, heating at around two to three times the global average.