Death Valley
Death Valley in eastern California is the hottest place on Earth. The world record air temperature of 56.7 °C was measured here in 1913. The valley floor is also the lowest point in North America, at 86 metres below sea level. Yet despite its name and its extreme reputation, Death Valley supports a surprising amount of life and is one of the most popular national parks in the United States.
- CountryUnited StatesIn southeastern California
- Hottest temperature56.7 °CRecorded 10 July 1913 (world record)
- Lowest elevation-86 mLowest point in North America
- Rainfallapprox. 60 mm/yearAmong the driest in the USA
- Park areaapprox. 13,800 km²Biggest national park in the lower 48
- Famous featureSailing stonesRocks that mysteriously move across the dry lake
How does Death Valley compare for heat?
The 1913 Death Valley record is the highest air temperature ever reliably measured anywhere on Earth.
What is Death Valley?
Death Valley is a long narrow valley in eastern California, just over the border from Nevada. It is the lowest, hottest and driest place in North America. The valley sits at the bottom of two parallel mountain ranges, the Panamint Range to the west and the Amargosa Range to the east. The lowest spot, called Badwater Basin, lies at 86 metres below sea level. Just 25 km away across the valley, the Telescope Peak rises to 3,367 metres. The total height difference is over 3,400 metres.
Why is it so hot?
Several things combine to make Death Valley so extreme:
- Low elevation. The valley floor is well below sea level, so the air pressure is higher. Higher pressure means warmer air.
- Trapped heat. The valley is shaped like a long bowl, surrounded by tall mountains. Hot air sinks into the bowl and cannot escape easily.
- Dry air. With almost no clouds or moisture, sunlight pours down on the valley floor with full force every day. Dry air also cools much faster at night, but the daily extremes are huge.
- Dark rocks. The valley floor and surrounding mountains are dark in colour and absorb a lot of solar heat.
The sailing stones
One of Death Valley's strangest features is the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa. Racetrack Playa is a dry lake bed in the western part of the park. Across its flat, cracked surface lie hundreds of stones, some weighing over 300 kg, each with a long winding trail in the mud behind it. The stones somehow move across the lake bed, sometimes hundreds of metres at a time, with no one seeing them move. The mystery puzzled scientists for over a century.
The puzzle was finally solved in 2014. Time-lapse cameras showed that under certain rare conditions (a thin film of water on the lake bed, freezing overnight to form thin sheets of ice, then breaking up in the morning sun under a gentle breeze), the stones get pushed slowly across the muddy surface by the moving ice. The whole process is slow and silent, which is why no one ever saw it.
Wildlife of Death Valley
Despite the conditions, Death Valley supports a surprising amount of life. There are desert bighorn sheep in the high mountains, coyotes, roadrunners, kit foxes, kangaroo rats (which can live their entire lives without ever drinking water), and a rare fish called the Devil's Hole pupfish that lives in a single warm spring at the edge of the park and is one of the rarest fish in the world.
Deeper dive: tectonic origins, the Devil's Hole pupfish and the heat record
Death Valley sits in a special kind of geological feature called a pull-apart basin. The valley is bounded by faults on both sides where the Earth's crust is slowly being stretched east-west. As the crust stretches, the valley floor drops down between the rising mountain ranges on either side. This is the same process that built the wider Basin and Range province of the western United States, a region of parallel mountain ranges separated by deep valleys that covers most of Nevada and parts of California, Utah, Oregon, Arizona and Mexico. Death Valley is the deepest of these basins. The faults are still active; the valley floor continues to drop by a few millimetres per year.
The Devil's Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) is one of the world's rarest fish and one of its most remarkable. The entire global population (usually fewer than 200 fish) lives in a single small pool in a limestone cavern on the eastern edge of Death Valley National Park. The pool is approx. 22 by 3.5 metres at the surface but extends down at least 130 metres into a fully water-filled cave. The water is warm (around 33 °C, near the upper limit for fish survival) and almost lacking in oxygen. The fish are tiny (around 2.5 cm long) and have evolved over the last few tens of thousands of years from ancestors that lived in much larger Pleistocene lakes. They feed on algae growing on a single shallow shelf in the cave that gets sunlight; the size of the shelf may set the population limit.
The Death Valley heat record of 56.7 °C, set on 10 July 1913 at Furnace Creek, has been challenged repeatedly. A 1922 reading in Libya of 58 °C was officially the world record until 2012, when it was disqualified after a re-examination found the thermometer had likely been placed on tarmac rather than over grass. The Death Valley record has its own critics: some scientists argue the 1913 reading was abnormally high compared to surrounding stations on the same day and may have been a misread. The World Meteorological Organisation, after its own investigation in 2012, formally confirmed Death Valley's 1913 reading as the world record. More recent Death Valley readings of 54.4 °C in 2020 and 2021 are some of the highest reliably-measured temperatures of recent times.
Death Valley is part of the wider Mojave Desert. The country is the United States.