How Low Can You Go? Badwater Basin, and a Real Hell on Earth

Salt flats at Badwater, -282 feet. The snowcapped mountain in the distance is Telescope Peak, 11,049 feet.

How bad could it be? On our recent trip to Death Valley, we made the rather mandatory pilgrimage to Badwater, the lowest point in North America at -282 feet (86 meters). Although the hottest temperature ever recorded on planet Earth was measured at Furnace Creek Ranch in 1913 (56.7°C; 134°F), it is known that Badwater is often 2 degrees hotter. That's hot. Really hot.

I've regularly worked and played in temperatures as high as 105°F without ill effect at home in the Great Valley of California. I floated down the Colorado River in August of 2013 where temperatures soared as high as 118°F, and I realized that I could have been in trouble if we didn't have the river to dip in every few minutes (because it flowed from deep within Lake Powell, the water temperature was around 48°F even many miles downstream). The hottest moment I've ever experienced was in the aforementioned Death Valley when we had an occasion to be there in late May, and an early heat wave shot temperatures to a near record 122°F. It was simply intolerable outdoors...we retreated to the motel room until the sun went down before emerging to seek dinner. People no doubt adapt to such conditions, but it can't be pleasant.

Alluvial fan just south of Badwater. The terraces on the fan are fault scarps, indicating the role of faulting in the subsidence  of Death Valley.

Standing at the lowest point in North America does cause one to consider other low places on the planet. The National Park Service provides a handy guide on interpretive signs and on their websites. They note that all of the low places also tend to be exceedingly dry and hot, and that the source of the low elevation is generally tectonic in origin. Those low points are as follows:

Dead Sea (Jordan/Israel) -1360 feet (-414 m)

Lake Assal (Djibouti, Africa) -509 feet (-155 m)

Turpan Pendi (China) -505 feet (-154 m)

Qattara Depression (Egypt) -435 feet (-133 m)

Vpadina Kaundy (Kazakstan) -433 ft (-132 m)

Denakil (Ethiopia) -410 ft (-125 m)

Laguna del Carbón (Argentina) -344 ft (-105 m)

Death Valley (United States) -282 ft (-86 m)

Vpadina Akchanaya (Turkmenistan) -266 ft (-81 m)

Salton Sea (California) -227 ft (-69 m)

Sebkhet Tah (Morroco) -180 ft (-55 m)

Sabkhat Ghuzayyil (Libya) -154 ft (-47 m)

Lago Enriquillo (Dominican Republic) -151 ft (-46 m)

Salinas Chicas (Argentina) -131 ft (-40 m)

Caspian Sea (Central Asia) -92 ft (-28 m)

Lake Eyre (Australia) -49 ft (-15 m)

The Black Mountains provide the backdrop to Badwater. They rise steeply more than a mile above the salt flats.

Looking at this list, it is clear that the Dead Sea is in a class by itself as far as low elevations are concerned. At nearly 1,400 feet below sea level, it is unique in the world. To find anything deeper, we have to reach back into the depths of geologic time. The Strait of Gibraltar is narrow and shallow, and is the only connection between the Mediterranean and any other ocean. What would happen if it ever separated the two oceans? It's not totally idle speculation...it turns out that this actually happened, about six million years ago. The speculation began when vast amounts of salt, gypsum and anhydrite deposits were discovered beneath the seafloor sediments of today's Mediterranean Sea.

When the cutoff occurred, the Mediterranean immediately began to dry up. And dried more. And then even more. The level of the sea dropped precipitously. It dropped past the 1,000 foot level. And then 2,000. And it kept going. Until the level of the basin reached 15,000 feet below sea level. Three miles below sea level. The implications are staggering in many ways. The Nile and Rhone Rivers would have started cutting deep channels far below their normal level. In places, the subsequent sedimentary layers hide canyons that were once 8,000 feet deep (The Grand Canyon, for comparison is 5-6 thousand feet deep). 

The climate changes would be extreme. Air sinking into the basin would increase temperatures at the dry adiabatic rate of 5.5°F per thousand feet. That amounts to conditions at the lowest reaches of the Mediterranean Basin that would be 70°F higher than they would be at sea level. In this desert environment, summertime temperatures could reach 176°F. No organisms could survive at these levels except for a few thermophiles. This is a place no human could or would be able to venture.

And imagine the end. Imagine the moment that the Atlantic Ocean began seeping over the Strait of Gibraltar. Seepage that turned into a torrent, and then a torrent that turned into a flood, and a flood that turned into a deluge beyond imagining. Some calculations suggest flows equivalent to 1,000 Amazon Rivers at once. The entire ocean basin could have filled in between a few months to two years. Sea level would have risen as much as 30 feet per day. This event is called the Zanclean Flood.

All in all, this place would have been hell on Earth, at least until the waters came...

PS: The Rhone River, not the Rhine. Correction made, thank you Olivier Malinur.

Death Valley is Really Second Generation Death Valley: A Look at Death Valley Version 1.0

Death Valley is a stunning example of a fault graben, a large area of crust that subsided because of extensional forces that produced widespread "normal" faulting (where the fault plane slopes towards the basin). The valley has relief of more than two miles, from the summit of Telescope Peak at 11,043 feet (6,168 meters) to Badwater Basin at minus 282 feet (-86 meters). Perhaps more extraordinary is the fact that the valley has filled with eroded sediments to a depth of as much as 9,000 feet. Remove the sediment and Death Valley would be nearly four miles deep!

One might imagine what it would look like if the sediments of Death Valley were somehow lifted up and dissected by erosion. What would one see? There would no doubt be layers of salt and gypsum, silt and clay, and conglomerate and breccia from the alluvial fans that line the margins of the valley. Volcanoes are found along the margins of the Death Valley today. Perhaps one could expect to see colorful exposures of lava and tuff in the deeply buried valley sediments.

What's fascinating about Death Valley is that we don't have to imagine what the valley fill would look like. It turns out that the graben that formed the valley is not the first to have existed in this area. It formed around two or three million years ago, but extensional forces have been stretching this region for something like 15-16 million years. Other grabens developed, filled with thousands of feet of sediment, and were lifted by faulting so that erosion revealed the underlying rock and sediment. One of these more ancient basins is revealed at Zabriskie Point, one of the most visited and dramatic of Death Valley's tourist destinations. The rock is called the Furnace Creek formation.

The rocks of Death Valley-Version 1.0, as seen in the Furnace Creek formation consist of fine-grained silt and clay interspersed with evaporate minerals like salt, gypsum, and most importantly for the miners of Death Valley, borates. There are layers of conglomerate and breccia from ancient alluvial fans, and colorful tuff and lava flows from associated volcanic activity. In the dry environment of Death Valley, the rocks have eroded into the intricate badlands that made Zabriskie Point a must-see part of any trip to the park.

The badlands are practically devoid of any kind of plant life. The barrenness results from the inability of stable soils to develop on the steep slopes. Any soils are quickly washed away during infrequent but violent cloudbursts.

The layers exposed in the Furnace Creek formation provide information about ancient environments that once existed in the Death Valley region, but also feed the imagination about the rocks hidden deep within today's fault graben, Death Valley-Version 2.0.

This has been another in an off and on series about our February visit to Death Valley. In the next installment, we'll be leaving Death Valley for other sights in the region, a detour made necessary by October flash floods that took out some of the park's roads. We'll be visiting a unique biological island in the desert...