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 exceed recharge. If the floor of a dry lake is covered by deposits of alkalin ...

some 10 meters below sea level in the

Sonoran Desert The Sonoran Desert () is a hot desert and ecoregion in North America that covers the northwestern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur, as well as part of the Southwestern United States (in Arizona and California). It ...

Baja California Baja California, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Baja California, is a state in Mexico. It is the northwesternmost of the 32 federal entities of Mexico. Before becoming a state in 1952, the area was known as the North Territory of B ...

, southwest of

Mexicali Mexicali (; ) is the capital city of the States of Mexico, Mexican state of Baja California. The city, which is the seat of the Mexicali Municipality, has a population of 689,775, according to the 2010 census, while the Calexico–Mexicali, Cale ...

. 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 Atmosphere of Earth, atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with annu ...

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 The Sierra de Juárez, also known as the Sierra Juarez, is a mountain range located in Tecate Municipality and northern Ensenada Municipality, within the northern Baja California state of northwestern Mexico. It is a major mountain range in ...

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 depression (geology), depressed block of the Crust (geology), crust of a planet or moon, bordered by parallel normal faults. Etymology ''Graben'' is a loan word from German language, German, meaning 'ditch' or 't ...

, which is linked to the

San Andreas Fault The San Andreas Fault is a continental Fault (geology)#Strike-slip faults, right-lateral strike-slip transform fault that extends roughly through the U.S. state of California. It forms part of the tectonics, tectonic boundary between the Paci ...

, and the

East Pacific Rise The East Pacific Rise (EPR) is a mid-ocean rise (usually 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), at a divergent tectonic plate bound ...

as part of the Laguna Salada Fault. This fault is connected to the Salton Trough fault which holds a similar depression, the

Salton Sink The Salton Sink is the low point of an endorheic basin, a closed drainage system with no outflows to other bodies of water, in the Colorado Desert sub-region of the Sonoran Desert. The sink falls within the larger Salton Trough and separates ...

. This sink is bigger than Laguna Salada and contains the

Salton Sea The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly salinity, saline endorheic lake in Riverside County, California, Riverside and Imperial County, California, Imperial counties in Southern California. It lies on the San Andreas Fault within the S ...

. The

2010 Baja California earthquake The 2010 Baja California earthquake (also known as 2010 Easter earthquake, 2010 Sierra El Mayor earthquake, or 2010 El Mayor – Cucapah earthquake) occurred on April 4 (Easter Sunday) with a moment magnitude scale, moment magnitude of 7.2 and a ...

occurred here. In the 2012 Boeing 727 crash experiment an airplane was deliberately crashed into the Laguna Salada.

References

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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 ← Mexicali Municipality Lowest points of countries

Tectonic activity

See also

References

External links