Moisture moving inland from the Pacific Ocean must pass eastward over the mountains to reach Death Valley as air masses are forced upward by each range, they cool and moisture condenses, to fall as rain or snow on the western slopes.
The valley is extremely dry, because it lies in the rain shadow of four major mountain ranges (including the Sierra Nevada and Panamint Range). Climate ĭeath Valley has a subtropical, hot desert climate ( Köppen: BWh), with long, extremely hot summers short, mild winters and little rainfall. Īs the area turned to desert, the water evaporated, leaving an abundance of evaporitic salts, such as common sodium salts and borax, which were later exploited during the modern history of the region, primarily 1883 to 1907. The end-basin in a chain of lakes that began with Mono Lake, in the north, and continued through basins down the Owens River Valley, through Searles and China Lakes and the Panamint Valley, to the immediate west.
The lake was nearly 100 miles (160 km) long and 600 feet (180 m) deep. According to current geological consensus, at various times during the middle of the Pleistocene era, which ended roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago, an inland lake, Lake Manly, formed in Death Valley. Furnace Creek and the Amargosa River flow through part of the valley and eventually disappear into the sands of the valley floor.ĭeath Valley also contains salt pans. The eastern end of the left lateral Garlock Fault intersects the Death Valley Fault. The valley is bisected by a right lateral strike slip fault system, comprising the Death Valley Fault and the Furnace Creek Fault. It lies at the southern end of a geological trough, Walker Lane, which runs north to Oregon. Map showing the system of once-interconnected Pleistocene lakes in eastern California (USGS)ĭeath Valley is a graben-a downdropped block of land between two mountain ranges. The highest point in Death Valley National Park is Telescope Peak, in the Panamint Range, which has an elevation of 11,043 feet (3,366 m). It runs from north to south between the Amargosa Range on the east and the Panamint Range on the west the Grapevine Mountains and the Owlshead Mountains form its northern and southern boundaries, respectively. Lying mostly in Inyo County, California, near the border of California and Nevada, in the Great Basin, east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Death Valley constitutes much of Death Valley National Park and is the principal feature of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve. This reading, however, and several others taken in that period, a century ago, are in dispute by some modern experts.
On the afternoon of July 10, 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded a high temperature of 134 ☏ (56.7 ☌) at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, which stands as the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on the surface of the Earth. It is 84.6 miles (136.2 km) east-southeast of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, with an elevation of 14,505 feet (4,421 m). ĭeath Valley's Badwater Basin is the point of lowest elevation in North America, at 282 feet (86 m) below sea level. During summer, it is one of the hottest places on Earth, along with deserts in the Middle East and the Sahara.