Zabriskie Point facts for kids
Zabriskie Point is a famous spot in Death Valley National Park in California, United States. It's known for its amazing landscape, shaped by erosion over millions of years.
The hills here are made of sediments from an ancient lake called Furnace Creek Lake. This lake dried up about 5 million years ago, long before Death Valley looked like it does today.
Contents
What's in a Name?
This special place is named after Christian Brevoort Zabriskie. He was an important person in the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the early 1900s.
His company used famous twenty-mule teams to carry borax from their mines in Death Valley. Borax is a mineral used in many products, like cleaning supplies.
How Zabriskie Point Was Formed
Millions of years ago, long before Death Valley became a wide, deep valley, a huge lake covered this area. This ancient lake started forming about nine million years ago.
The Ancient Lake and Its Sediments
For several million years, while the lake existed, different materials collected at its bottom. These included salty muds, gravel from nearby mountains, and ash from active volcanoes.
All these materials mixed together to form what we now call the Furnace Creek Formation. The weather around this ancient lake was dry, but not as dry as Death Valley is today.
Animals like camels, mastodons (which were like elephants), horses, and birds left their footprints in the lake's mud. We can also find fossils of grass and reeds from that time.
Minerals and Colors
Borates, which are minerals important to Death Valley's history, gathered in the lakebeds. They came from hot springs and changes in the rhyolite rock from nearby volcanoes.
The many colors you see at Zabriskie Point are also due to the rocks changing over time. This happened because of weather and hot water from underground.
Mountains Rise, Lakes Dry Up
As mountains grew taller to the west, the climate became drier and drier. This caused the big lake to dry up, leaving behind a dry lakebed.
Later, Death Valley became wider and sank even more. The Black Mountains also rose higher. This created the steep slopes needed for erosion to carve out the amazing badlands we see today.
Lava Caps and Manly Beacon
The dark rock on top of the badland ridges is lava from volcanoes that erupted three to five million years ago. This hard lava protects the softer rock underneath from erosion.
This might be why Manly Beacon, a tall rock outcrop to the right in the panoramic photo, stands much higher than other parts of the badlands.
Manly Beacon is named after William L. Manly. He helped guide a group of Forty-niners out of Death Valley during the California Gold Rush in 1849.
The Furnace Creek Formation is the main source of borate minerals found in Death Valley. This formation is over 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) thick and includes mudstone, siltstone, and conglomerate.
Zabriskie Point in Pop Culture
Zabriskie Point has appeared in many movies, albums, and books:
- Zabriskie Point is the name of a 1970 movie by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Its music includes songs by Pink Floyd and Jerry Garcia.
- The location is shown on the cover of U2's album The Joshua Tree.
- It was used to look like the surface of Mars in the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars.
- Zabriskie Point is also the name of an album by the band Radio Massacre International, released in 2000.
- In the novel Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin, Zabriskie Point is a secret Soviet code name for a place on the Moon.
- Zabriskie Point is an important place in the novels Fall of Night, Dust and Decay, and Fire and Ash by Jonathan Maberry. In these books, it's the location of a top-secret research station.
- This spot was used for filming the 1960 movie Spartacus.
- Pictures from Zabriskie Point were used to create the planet Arvala-7 in the first season of The Mandalorian.
See also
In Spanish: Zabriskie Point para niños
