The Lut Desert, widely referred to as Dasht-e Lut (Persian: دشت لوت, "Emptiness Plain"), is a salt desert located in the provinces of Kerman and Sistan-Baluchestan, Iran. It is the world's 33rd-largest desert, and was included in UNESCO's World Heritage List on July 17, 2016. The name is derived from 'Lut' which means bare and empty in Persian and 'dasht' which means plain in Persian. The surface of its sand has been measured at temperatures as high as 70.7 °C (159.3 °F), making it one of the world's driest and hottest places.

Iran is climatically part of the Afro-Asian belt of deserts, which stretches from Mauritania all the way to Mongolia. The patchy, elongated, light-colored feature in the foreground (parallel to the mountain range) is the northernmost of the Dasht dry lakes that stretch southward 300 kilometers (190 mi).

Iran's geography consists of a plateau surrounded by mountains and divided into drainage basins. Dasht-e Lut is one of the largest of these desert basins, 480 kilometers (300 mi) long and 320 kilometers (200 mi) wide, and is considered to be one of the driest places on Earth.