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Badwater Basin in Death Valley is the lowest point in North America, 86 meters (282 feet) below sea level. Yet it sits right beside, and in the shadow of, Telescope Peak, 3,368 meters (11,049 feet) high. The reason is faulting: as the region stretches apart, its basins sink and its mountains rise — and the process is still shaping the park today.
Image from the National Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory.
The park
Death Valley National Park is the largest national park in the lower 48 states, spanning about 1,365,030 hectares (3,373,063 acres) in California's Inyo and San Bernardino Counties and Nevada's Esmeralda and Nye Counties. Proclaimed a national monument on February 11, 1933, it became a national park on October 31, 1994, and was designated a Biosphere Reserve in 1984 for its world-renowned natural resources.
Its landscape holds mountain ranges, rock formations, sand dunes, dry lake playas, canyons, craters, desert springs and a great diversity of life — including the Devils Hole pupfish, a tiny fish found nowhere else, protected in its desert spring. In superbloom years, wildflowers carpet the land to the horizon.
A billion years in the open
Death Valley has some of the world's best surface rock exposures, showing complex, unusual tectonics and a wide range of geologic resources.
| Oldest | Metamorphic rocks about 1.8 billion years old, exposed in the Black Mountains |
| Youngest | Recent playa sediments on the valley floors |
| In between | Records of shallow seas, lakes and volcanic fields |
| Still at work | Plate tectonics and erosion, which built the rugged topography and continue to reshape it |
The park belongs to the Basin and Range physiographic province and shares its geologic history, and some of its characteristic formations, with a region far beyond its boundaries.
Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. Image from the National Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory.
Maps and inventories
The Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory, which produces digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks, has products for Death Valley on the NPS DataStore. A Soil Resources Inventory has not yet been completed for the park.
Sources
Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Death Valley National Park, California and Nevada," National Park Service Geologic Resources Inventory, which cites Anderson (2017); a work of the United States government in the public domain.
В изданияхDeath Valley National Park
Лицензия: CC0 1.0 (общественное достояние) · По материалам www.nps.gov
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