Death Valley Geography

Death Valley is a Graben, or valley, caused by faults. Most of the park is near or under sea level, and even one area, Badwater Basin, is -282 feet under sea level!

Around the valley, there are mountains that reach up to 11050 feet, or 2.1 miles above sea level! This mountain, named Telescopic Peak, is the highest area in the Death Valley Park. Along with this, it is one of the hottest areas in the world, reaching a record high of 134F.

Inside the valley is a grand salt lake. There is very little life in the salt lake, due to the extremely high salinity. These salt flats are nearly 200 square miles large, with almost no life inside of them.

Rock Composition and Salt Flats

The Park of Death Valley has a major composition of generally sedimentary stones. Some include Sandstone, Limestone, and Silstone, but however has Shale in the mix.

As the rock weathered, it fell into the valley, forming the modern rocks in the basin.

Why sedimentary?

The reason for all of the sedimentary rock is that, during the previous ice ages, water filled the basin that is the valley, allowing the mountains surrounding the valley to weather, and form the sedimentary rock in that area.

What are the salt flats?

The salt flats are a thin layer of salt in some deeper parts of the park. They are caused from evaporated trapped ocean water, that then leaves behind salt.

Formation

Death valley is a graben, or valley. This is formed from the plates nearby seperating, and allowing a wedge of bedrock to fall between plate faults. This, in turn, allows the above material, in a wedge, to fall.

Along with this, valcanoes slowly rose the mountains nearby it, and lowering the valley overall. Along with the lakes previously stated, it eroded rock, slowly filling parts of the valley.

However, no natural disasters or major weathering took place, besides the weathering caused by the lakes in the ice ages. The only weathering occured on the mountains, filling the valley with some rock, stated previously.

This whole feature of the earth took 30MY to form, from 35MYA from starting, to 5MYA to settle. At the time of the formation of this valley, the Americas were just done to settle into what we know today, and some good quarter of the eastern hemisphere was flooded. The Antarctic area was just starting to freeze, while the Arctic area was still liquid water. However, mammals started to take a good leap into more modern animals, things almost like horses and felines.

Citations

www.ohranger.com - Geological Information
NPS.com - Geolocical Information and Telescopic Peak
airandspace.si.edu - Graben Diagram 1
trover.com - Salt Flat 1
images.unsplash.com - Salt Flat 2
3.bp.blogspot.com - Texturing
pinterest.com - I couldn't find the OP - Graben Diagram 2