Salt of the Earth
Sodium Chloride—better known as table salt—makes up the majority of salts on Badwater Basin. Other evaporative minerals found here include calcite, gypsum, and borax.
Intense Concentration
The source of Badwater’s salts is Death Valley’s drainage system of 9,000 square miles—an area larger than New Hampshire. Rain falling on distant peaks creates floods that rush ever lower. Along the way, minerals dissolve from rocks and join the flood. Here, at the lowest elevation, floods come to rest, forming temporary lakes. As the water evaporates, minerals concentrate until only the salts remain. After thousands of years, enough salts have washed in to produce layer upon layer of salt crust.
Crystal Power
The vast, surreal salt flats of Badwater Basin change constantly. Salt crystals expand, pushing the crust of salt into rough, chaotic forms. Newly formed crystals ooze between mudcracks, sketching strange patterns on the surface of the salt flat. Passing rainstorms wash off windblown dust and generate a fresh layer of blinding white salt.
Floods create temporary lakes that dissolve salts back into solution, starting the process all over again.
Intense Concentration
The source of Badwater's salts is Death Valley's drainage system of over 9,000 square miles--an area larger than New Hampshire. Rain fallling on distant peaks creates floods that rush ever lower. Along the way, minerals dissolve from rocks and join the flood. Here, at the lowest elevation, floods come to rest, forming temporary lakes. As the water evaporates, minerals concentrate until only the salts remain. After thousands of years, enough salts have washed in to produce layer upon layer of salt crust.
Sodium Chloride--better known as table salt--makes up the majority of salts on Badwater Basin. Other evaporative minerals found here include calcite, gypsum, and borax. Bad Water Water is rare and precious in Death Valley. A surveyor could not get his mule to drink from the pool. He wrote on his map that the location had "bad water," and the name stuck.
Badwater Pool is not poisonous just salty, as the presence of pickleweed, aquatic insects, and larvae proves. It is also home to one of Death Valley's rarest animals-- the Badwater Snail. These tiny mollusks exist only in a few springs at the edge of Death Valley salt flats.
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