DEATH VALLEY, THE HIGHEST TEMPERATURE ON EARTH

Death Valley National Park, California

The heat wave that is affecting the Mediterranean lands is extremely hot and it is very difficult to live and do your routines when temperatures are so high. The Grandma is an old person and she takes cares of her health. She prefers winter to summer because hot temperatures affect her more than cold ones.

Today, The Grandma has decided to stay at home and avoid sun and high temperatures. She has remembered Salvador Espriu, her favourite poet, who was born on a day like today in Arenys de Mar, a beautiful town near Barcelona.

Finally, she has also decided to read about extreme temperatures and she has learnt lots of things about Death Valley, the desert valley located in Eastern California, where on a day like today in 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded 57 °C, the highest temperature ever to be recorded on Earth.

Death Valley is a desert valley located in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert bordering the Great Basin Desert. It is one of the hottest places in the world along with deserts in the Middle East.

Death Valley's Badwater Basin is the point of the lowest elevation in North America, at 86 m below sea level. This point is 136.2 km east-southeast of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, with an elevation of 4,421 m.

On the afternoon of July 10, 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded a high temperature of 56.7°C at Furnace Creek in Death Valley. This temperature stands as the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded at the surface of the Earth.

More information: National Park Service

Located 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.

It is located mostly in Inyo County, California. 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. It has an area of about 7,800 km2. The highest point in Death Valley itself is Telescope Peak in the Panamint Range, which has an elevation of 3,366 m.

Death Valley National Park, California

Death Valley is an example of a graben, or a downdropped block of land between two mountain ranges. It lies at the southern end of a geological trough known as Walker Lane, which runs north to Oregon. The valley is bisected by a right lateral strike slip fault system, represented by the Death Valley Fault and the Furnace Creek Fault.

The eastern end of the left lateral Garlock Fault intersects the Death Valley Fault. Furnace Creek and the Amargosa River flow through the valley but eventually disappear into the sands of the valley floor.

Death Valley also contains salt pans. 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 referred to as Lake Manly formed in Death Valley. Lake Manly was nearly 160 km long and 180 m deep, the end-basin in a chain of lakes that began with Mono Lake in the north and continued through multiple basins down the Owens River Valley through Searles and China Lakes and the Panamint Valley to the immediate west.

As the area turned to desert, the water evaporated, leaving the 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.

More information: Live Science

Death Valley has a subtropical, hot desert climate, Köppen: BWh, with long, extremely hot summers and short, mild winters, as well as little rainfall.

Death Valley is extremely dry because it sits in the rain shadow of four major mountain ranges, including the Sierra Nevada and Panamint Range. Moisture moving inland from the Pacific Ocean must pass eastward over multiple mountains to reach Death Valley; as air masses are forced upwards by each range, the air cools and moisture condenses to fall as rain or snow on the western slopes. When the air masses ultimately reach Death Valley, most of the moisture has already been squeezed out and there is little left to fall as precipitation.

Timbisha-Shoshone Nation Indians in Death Valley

In 2005, Death Valley received four times its average annual rainfall of 38 mm. As it has done before for hundreds of years, the lowest spot in the valley filled with a wide, shallow lake, but the extreme heat and aridity immediately began evaporating the ephemeral lake.

The pair of images seen at right from NASA's Landsat 5 satellite documents the short history of Death Valley's Lake Badwater: formed in February 2005 (top) and evaporated by February 2007 (bottom). In 2005, a big pool of greenish water stretched most of the way across the valley floor. By May 2005 the valley floor had resumed its more familiar role as Badwater Basin, a salt-coated salt flats. In time, this freshly dissolved and recrystallized salt will darken.

The western margin of Death Valley is traced by alluvial fans. During flash floods, rainfall from the steep mountains to the west pours through narrow canyons, picking up everything from fine clay to large rocks. When these torrents reach the mouths of the canyons, they widen and slow, branching out into distributary channels. The paler the fans, the younger they are.

More information: Native American Netroots

In spite of the overwhelming heat and sparse rainfall, Death Valley exhibits considerable biodiversity. Wildflowers, watered by snowmelt, carpet the desert floor each spring, continuing into June. Bighorn sheep, red-tailed hawks, and wild burros may be seen.

Death Valley has over 600 springs and ponds. Salt Creek, a mile-long shallow depression in the center of the valley, supports pupfish. These isolated pupfish populations are remnants of the wetter Pleistocene climate.

Darwin Falls, on the western edge of Death Valley Monument, falls 30 m into a large pond surrounded by willows and cottonwood trees. Over 80 species of birds have been spotted around the pond.

Death Valley is home to the Timbisha tribe of Native Americans, formerly known as the Panamint Shoshone, who have inhabited the valley for at least the past millennium. The Timbisha name for the valley, tümpisa, means rock paint and refers to the red ochre paint that can be made from a type of clay found in the valley. Some families still live in the valley at Furnace Creek. 

Another village was in Grapevine Canyon near the present site of Scotty's Castle. It was called in the Timbisha language maahunu, whose meaning is uncertain, although it is known that hunu means canyon.

More information: Indian Country Today

Death Valley is really wide-open 

-it's bigger than Rhode Island-

and it's less a part of California 

than an ungoverned territory,

so there's lots of weird 

cops-and-robbers stuff going on.

Gus Van Sant