Badwater Basin: The Lowest Place in North America

Look up. On the canyon wall above you, at what seems like an unremarkable height, there is a small white sign that reads Sea Level. You are standing two hundred eighty-two feet below it.

Badwater Basin is the lowest point in North America, two hundred eighty-two feet below sea level. The white crust underfoot is salt, primarily sodium chloride, but also calcite and gypsum in a crystalline structure that is never entirely static. The basin floods slightly in wet winters, dissolving the surface crystal layer. As the water evaporates, the salt recrystallizes into new formations. The surface you see has been laid down and dissolved and relaid thousands of times.

The water in the small spring-fed pool at the edge of the parking area is not poisonous, but it is too saline to drink and too caustic to be useful. In the eighteen nineties, a government surveyor came through with his mule, and the mule refused to drink from the pool. The surveyor placed a sign reading bad water to warn future travelers. The warning became the name.

The temperature at Badwater Basin has officially reached one hundred thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, the highest reliably recorded air temperature on Earth. That record was set in July of nineteen thirteen at Greenland Ranch, a few miles to the north. The official world record has been challenged in recent decades by some meteorologists, but it remains the standard in most reference sources.

What Badwater Basin is, at the most basic level, is the floor of a valley that is actively sinking. The valley formed along a fault system, and the faults are still moving. The salt flat is not ancient history. It is geology in the present tense, still dropping, still accreting, still accumulating the runoff from the mountains that surround it on every side.