Artist Drive, Death Valley National Park, CA, 3/4/2016
The rugged Black Mountains form the southeastern end of the Amargosa Range System and lie in a predominantly north-south direction. Here we are looking east at the mountains from a hilltop just south of Artist Drive, a dramatic view that caught my eye. Lower Death Valley lies to the west and southwest. In the 1930s, American geologist Levi Fatzinger Noble (1882-1965) studied the faulting and folding in the area, dubbing it the "Amargosa chaos" due to the extreme warping of the rock. Later researchers discovered that the region had undergone substantial tension that pulled large blocks of crust apart. During Mesozoic or Early Tertiary time, a deformational geologic event folded the layered Precambrian and Cambrian sedimentary rocks in this mountain range. At the center of my photograph, the deformation is clearly visible where there are bent and almost vertical stripes, bands of rock, sedimentary layers that were originally horizontal.
