Geology of the Death Valley area
The oldest rocks in the area that now includes Death Valley National Park are extensively metamorphosed by intense heat and pressure and are at least 1700 million years old. The region’s first known fossils of complex life are thought to be from the Snowball Earth event, which may have occurred in the early part of the Proterozoic eon.
About Geology of the Death Valley area in brief
The oldest rocks in the area that now includes Death Valley National Park are extensively metamorphosed by intense heat and pressure and are at least 1700 million years old. These rocks were intruded by a mass of granite 1400 Ma and later uplifted and exposed to nearly 500 million years of erosion. The Pahrump Group of formations were deposited from 1200 to 800 mya in the Amargosa aulacogen. This somber, gray, almost featureless crystalline complex is composed of originally sedimentary and igneous rocks with large quantities of quartz and feldspar mixed in. Outcrops can be seen along the front of the Black Mountains in Death Valley and in the Talc and Ibex Hills. A major gap in the geologic record, affected by a major rift, affected the region, but geologists do not know what happened to the sediment that eroded that must have overlain the complex, but they do know that the area was originally below the surface of a shallow sea. The region’s first known fossils of complex life are thought to be from the Snowball Earth event, which may have occurred in the early part of the Proterozoic eon. It is thought to have created the Basin and Range province 2 to 3 million years ago, ripping it apart and creating Death Valley, Panamint Valley and surrounding ranges. The area is now home to 23 formations of sedimentary units and at least one distinct set of related formations geologists call a group. It also includes the Kingston Mountains, the Kingston Range, and the eastern part of eastern California’s San Diego County.
It has been named the Death Valley Area by the U.S. Geological Survey and the California Department of Lands and Natural Resources, and it is home to the National Park Service’s Desert Research Center, which is based in San Diego. It was named after Death Valley Valley, California, which was the site of the first recorded human contact with the Earth in the late 1800s. It’s also known as the San Francisco Bay Area because of the city’s proximity to the San Diego River and the city of San Diego, which has a population of 1.3 million people. The desert environment seen today developed after these lakes dried up. It filled Death Valley during each glacial period from 240,000 years ago to 10,500 years ago. The last of these lakes, Lake Manly, was the largest of the lakes; it filled the area during the current ice age. The current lakes were cut off from glacial melt from the Sierra Nevada, starving them of water and concentrating salts and minerals. This process continues into the present and is believed to be responsible for creating the basin and range province. It started around 16 Ma and is thought that upwelling from the subducted spreading-zone of the Farallon Plate. Erosion over many millions of years created a relatively featureless plain. By 2.5 Ma this province had spread to the death Valley area, ripped it apart, and created Death Valley.
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This page is based on the article Geology of the Death Valley area published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
