Flora Picture of the Year 2010 (Gurcharan Singh): Death Valley in California

[Gurcharan Singh]

My Flora Picture of the Year would have two photographs both from California and both processed by my son Manpreet Singh, who has keen interest in photography and courtesy whom I acquired by digitat SLR Camera leading to my joining this group and renewing my interest in Flora ofter a long gap and gave me a reason to remain occupied and enjoy this all.

    The first one a photograph of Death Valley, a name that scared me initially and Pankaj ji found the name strange. The reality dawned when I actually visited the area and saw its lowest spot Badwater basin. As the lowest point in Western Hemisphere, Death Valley belongs to the  world-wide Geographic rogue's gallery whose members share these defining features:

  1. To have exposed land below sea level, an extremely dry climate is necessary. It wet climates low places fill with water and overflow to sea. A dry climate evaporates water, leaving back salt flats or brine water.

  2. Like most these locations, Death valley was not created by river erosion. Movements of Earth's crust have dropped it to such great depths.

Badwater basin in Death valley is 282 ft below sea level. It is the hottest spot in the world Summer day time temperatures exceed 49 C (highest 54 C recorded in July 1913). In low valley sun heats the air, the slopes around trap rising hot air and recirculates it down into the valley for further heating. It is also the driest place in North America with annual rainfall of only 5 cm, being in the rain shadow. Ancient water fills this basin year round. Much of it began as Ice Age snow and rainwater hundreds of miles away in mountains of Central Nevada. The runoff seeped into porous limestone bedrock and began a long underground flow through a regional aquifer, emerging through a faultline in Badwater region. Salts dissolve from old deposits and flow to the surface making the spring water "Bad". The phenomenon continues even now. The rain falling on distant peaks creates floods which rush down dissolving salts on way from rocks and settle into the pool of "Badwater basin". As the water evaporates rapidly due to intense heat, the salt concentration increases and finally only salts remains, forming layers over layers of salt, which take a variety of patterns on the surface with freshly formed salt crystals oozing out..

   Such extremely salty habitat does not allow much life to survive but one can find a plant pickleweed (Sarcocornia pacifica) along edges,  the badwater snail and a few and few insects in pools of water.     
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Dr. Gurcharan Singh
Retired  Associate Professor
SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007
Res: 932 Anand Kunj, Vikas Puri, New Delhi-110018.
Phone: 011-25518297  Mob: 9810359089
http://people.du.ac.in/~singhg45/

[J.M. Garg]

Thanks, Singh ji.

A lovely composition & a good details.

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With regards,
J.M.Garg (jmg...@gmail.com)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jmgarg1
'Creating awareness of Indian Flora & Fauna'
The whole world uses my Image Resource of more than a thousand species & eight thousand images of Birds, Butterflies, Plants etc. (arranged alphabetically & place-wise): http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:J.M.Garg. You can also use them for free as per liberal licensing conditions attached with each image.

For identification, learning, discussion & documentation of Indian Flora, please visit/ join our Google e-group- Efloraofindia:http://groups.google.co.in/group/indiantreepix (more than 1490 members & 59,000 messages on 5/1/11 & with a database of around 4450 species on 15/12/10)

[tanay bose]

Nice catch and lovely writeup

Tanay

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Tanay Bose

Research Assistant & Teaching Assistant.
Department of Botany.
University of British Columbia .
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