How did death valley get its name?

Death Valley

Death valley was named in 1849 but the survivors of a party of prospectors, many of whom died of heat and thirst while looking for gold in the valley.  The hottest, driest and lowest place in the United States is Death Valley.  Death Valley is a desert basin that lies mostly in Southern California.

Death Valley is about 140 miles long and 4 to 16 miles wide.  About 500 square miles of the valley are below sea level, including the lowest spot in North America (282 feet below sea lever near Bad Water).

Only about two inches of rain fall on Death Valley’s wastelands each year and the scorching heat has reached 134 degree in the shade—a record high temperature in the United States.  Despite the burning hear many kinds of plants thrive here, such as mesquite and desert holly.  You can find coyotes, rabbits, rattlesnakes, birds and many other creatures living here, too. – Dick Rogers

Why Is A Desert Dry?

Deserts cover nearly a fifth of the earth’s surface.  We would probably describe a desert as a hot, barren land where it hardly ever rains—a land so dry that few plants can grow on it, and where other

Dry Desert

forms of life also find it difficult to exits.  The desert we have just described occupies nearly a fifth of the earth’s land surface.  Large deserts can be found in all of the continents except Europe.

The driest and hottest deserts are found in the trade wind zones north and south of the Equator.  Deserts in these areas, such as the Sahara Desert of North Africa, are dry even though they may be near the ocean waters.  Here the winds blow across the desert toward the Equator and become very hot and dry, and release little of their moisture as rain.

Some deserts are dry because they are so far from the sea that the winds blowing in from the ocean lose their moisture long before they reach these deserts.  And in many cases, desert regions are cut off from the moisture laden sea air by tall mountains that catch the rainfall on their seaward side. – Dick Rogers

What is a heat lightning?

Heat lighting is the flashes of light produced by distant electrical storms.  The flashes of lightning occur too far away for thunder to be heard.

Sometimes, on warm summer evenings, we see so-called “heat lightning”—silent flashes of light in the distant sky.  Heat lightning is really light from a flash of chain lightning that takes place beyond the horizon.  Chain, or forked, lightning is the lightning you see zig-zagging across the sky in any thunderstorm.

We just don’t hear heat lightning’s thunder because we are too far away.  We don’t see the lightning either.  We see its light reflected from high clouds.  Lightning is a big electric spark that spears its way across the sky.  During a thunderstorm, electrical charges are built up in the clouds.  If the charges become great enough, a flash of lightning occurs.

As the lightning flashes across the sky, it quickly heats the air in its path.  The heated air expands (spreads out) rapidly and sets a great sound wave in motion which we hear a few moments later as thunder.

What are icebergs?

Icebergs are large, floating chunks of ice that have broken off from glaciers,  to drift about in the ocean.  Icebergs are the broken-off end of glaciers that tumble into the water and drift out into the sea.  The biggest are huge, floating blocks of ice that weigh several million tons.  Some are a mile or more across and tower hundreds of feet above the surface.

An iceberg floating in the sea does not look nearly as big as it really is.  About seven-eighths of it is below the water, out of sight.  Icebergs are made up of fresh water ice, since they are formed on land from snowfalls.  Their white color is caused by tiny bubbles of air trapped in the ice.

Ocean currents often carry icebergs hundreds of mile out to sea before they melt and finally disappear.

In 1912, a large ocean liner, the Titanic, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean and sand, with a great loss of life.  Since that time, the United States Coast Guard has patrolled the North Atlantic shipping lanes, warning ships of the location of large icebergs.

What Are Windmills Used For?

Windmill

A windmill is a machine that uses the power of the wind for pumping water and generating electric power.  A windmill is a machine that uses the power of the wind to do work of some kind.  In the United States, windmills are generally to be found on farms where they serve as a cheap source or power for pumping water from wells and driving electric generators for electric power.

The kind of windmill commonly used to bump well water has a big wheel with several blades.  It is usually mounted on tail tower so that the blades will catch the full force of the win.  A tall vane acts as a rudder and keeps the wheel facing into the wind.

By the means of gears, the turning wheel provides the power to work a pump, a small electric generator, or to do some other useful job.  Of course, a windmill is not of any use unless there is enough wind to turn it.  Today, many farmers don’t use windmills to get water from their wells.  They use electric pumps to do the work because they are more dependable.-Dick Rogers

What is a shooting star?

Shooting stars are tiny meteors that glow white hot when they hurtle from out of space into the earth’s atmosphere. 

If you look up at the sky long enough on a dark, clear night, you may see the fiery streak of a “shooting star” flash across the sky. 

Shooting Star

While “shooting star” may be a pretty name, it is not accurate, for real stars are great glowing balls of gases far out in space.

The “shooting stars” that streaks across the sky are bits of rock and metal called meteors.  Many billions of meteors zip around through space.

Many of them come so close that they are captured by earth’s gravity, and are pulled toward earth.  As the speeding meteors hurtle into the earth’s atmosphere, friction with the air causes them to glow white hot.  Then we see them as blazing trails of lights.

Meteors rarely blaze for more than a few seconds.  Most of those we see were originally no bigger than a grain of rice.  They usually burn up before they reach the ground.

Meteors that survive their fall and land on earth are called meteorites.-Dick Rogers

What does the inside of the earth look like?

Beneath the earth’s rocky crust are the hard mantel, hot liquid outer core, and the solid metal inner core.

Have you ever tried to dig a deep hole—maybe all the way to the other side of the world?  Of course, you could dig only a few feet.  But suppose you could dig a hole straight to the center of the earth.  What would you find on the way?

Earth

First comes the crust, or rocky “skin,” that covers the earth.  This may be about 30 miles thick in some places.  As we go down into this crust, we find that it  begins to get hotter and hotter.  At two miles below the surface of the earth, the temperature is hot enough to boil water.   Next comes a layer of hard, black rock, about 1,800 miles thick.  Inside this layer is the earth’s core.  The core seems to be a kind of super-hot liquid metal.

Scientists think that in the center of this core there lies a ball-shaped inner core of solid metal, which forms the very center of the earth itself.  We have been able to find out about the inside of the earth by studying earthquakes.  Probably we will never get to look at the earth’s core, but someday we will know more about it.-Dick Rogers