For a few days now, the National Park Service has been offering a “rare opportunity”: canoeing in Death Valley, considered the driest place in the United States.
Manly Lake has reappeared in the area, located 500 kilometers northeast of Los Angeles, on the border between the States of California and Nevada.
The lake body has formed in the Badwater basin, located 86 meters below sea level, the lowest point in North America.
Yes, the occasion promoted by the park rangers is special.
The ephemeral lake had not gushed since 2005.
“One would think that with no landlocked land, there would always be a lake in Death Valley, but this is extremely rare.
Normally, the amount of water that floats is much less than the rate of evaporation,” said park ranger Abby Wines a few days ago.
Some of the highest temperatures ever recorded have been recorded in this region.
In the summer of 1913 the thermometer supposedly registered 57º C. Last July, the expected area touched previous marks with the mercury approaching 54.4º C.
The Manly is now almost 10 kilometers long and 4.8 kilometers long.
But it is only 30 centimeters deep.
Wines estimates that this is deep enough to be kayakable for the “next two weeks or maybe a little longer.”
The water has been carried by the Amargosa River, which has flowed to the south of the basin thanks to the constant rains of the last year.
The lake began to form in August, when Tropical Storm
Hilary
brought record rainfall to the area.
In just a couple of days, about 51 millimeters of rain fell on the site, more than the annual average that Death Valley receives per year.
Hilary not only left a wetness not seen in years, she also caused chaos.
The large amount of water caused flooding and landslides that led the National Park Service to close the area for about two months.
When the visitors returned, Manly had already lost volume.
A photograph taken this February in the Badwater Basin, Death Valley. NASA (K. Skilling/National Park Service)
“Many of us believed that by October the lake would have disappeared.
“We are shocked that we are still seeing it six months later,” Wines said.
According to the NASA observatory, the body is still alive thanks to the chain of atmospheric rivers that entered from the Pacific during February.
This set of phenomena has caused nine deaths and multimillion-dollar damage.
It has also left a voluminous amount of water.
The valley received another 38 millimeters of water, raising the arid region's rainfall count to 125 millimeters in one semester.
We must go back to the Pleistocene, a period 10,000 million years ago, to find the history of the lake that emerged.
At that time, Death Valley had a huge glacial body 160 kilometers long and 182 meters deep.
In the modern era, what is most common in the basin is a saline soil surrounded by alluvial fans, the trail that water currents leave after carrying sediments down the faces of the mountains.
Before this occasion, the Manly had arisen in February 2005, when this inhospitable region in which there is hardly any life received four times the amount of rain it records in a year.
NASA's Landsat 5 satellite then captured images of the long, shallow lake.
The intense temperatures meant that this only existed for a week.
By May it was history.
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