Laguna Salada (Spanish, "salty lagoon") is a vast
dry lake
A dry lake bed, also known as a playa, is a basin or depression that formerly contained a standing surface water body, which disappears when evaporation processes exceeds recharge. If the floor of a dry lake is covered by deposits of alkaline c ...
some 10 meters below sea level in the
Sonoran Desert
The Sonoran Desert ( es, Desierto de Sonora) is a desert in North America and ecoregion that covers the northwestern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur, as well as part of the southwestern United States (in Arizon ...
of
Baja California
Baja California (; 'Lower California'), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Baja California ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California), is a state in Mexico. It is the northernmost and westernmost of the 32 federal entities of Me ...
, southwest of
Mexicali
Mexicali (; ) is the capital city of the Mexican state of Baja California. The city, seat of the Mexicali Municipality, has a population of 689,775, according to the 2010 census, while the Calexico–Mexicali metropolitan area is home to 1,000 ...
. The lake's shape vaguely resembles a
rhombus
In plane Euclidean geometry, a rhombus (plural rhombi or rhombuses) is a quadrilateral whose four sides all have the same length. Another name is equilateral quadrilateral, since equilateral means that all of its sides are equal in length. The ...
. When dry, the flatness of the exposed lake bed sediments makes it a favoured location for recreational driving. It is also notorious for its dust storms when dry, usually the result of
monsoon
A monsoon () is traditionally a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with annual latitudinal osci ...
al thunderstorms during the summer. During times of significant rain the lagoon can fill completely with water, leaving the unpaved road along its west bank as the only means of traversing the area. Flanked by the
Sierra de Los Cucapah and the
Sierra de Juárez mountain ranges, the lake is approximately long and at its widest point.
Tectonic activity
The lake itself is located on the bottom of a shallow depression, a
graben
In geology, a graben () is a depressed block of the crust of a planet or moon, bordered by parallel normal faults.
Etymology
''Graben'' is a loan word from German, meaning 'ditch' or 'trench'. The word was first used in the geologic cont ...
, which is linked to the
San Andreas Fault
The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that extends roughly through California. It forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, and its motion is right-lateral strike-slip (horizontal) ...
, and the
East Pacific Rise
The East Pacific Rise is a mid-ocean rise (termed an oceanic rise and not a mid-ocean ridge due to its higher rate of spreading that results in less elevation increase and more regular terrain), a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along ...
as part of the
Laguna Salada Fault. This fault is connected to the Salton Trough fault which holds a similar depression, the
Salton Sink. This sink is bigger than Laguna Salada and contains the
Salton Sea
The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline body of water in Riverside and Imperial counties at the southern end of the U.S. state of California. It lies on the San Andreas Fault within the Salton Trough that stretches to the Gul ...
.
The
2010 Baja California earthquake occurred here.
See also
*
Lake Cahuilla
Lake Cahuilla ( ; also known as Lake LeConte and Blake Sea) was a prehistoric lake in California and northern Mexico. Located in the Coachella and Imperial valleys, it covered surface areas of to a height of above sea level during the Holoc ...
- prehistoric lake near Laguna Salada
References
*
*
*
External links
Satellite Photo (Google Maps)Vol. 44, Num. 1, pp. 103-111 A technical paper by Juan Contreras, Arturo Martín-Barajas and Juan Carlos Herguera on sedimentation of the LS-basin. Published in
Geofísica Internacional (2005)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Laguna Salada
Salada
Landforms of Baja California
Depressions (geology)
Endorheic lakes of North America
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Mexicali Municipality