Deserts

Many times, when we think of deserts, we think of huge, expansive regions of pure sand. Sometimes the sand even looks wavy, like water. These "waves" are called traps, and they are formed by wind blowing or pushing the sand across the expanse of land, resulting in the little raised pattern. When I think of deserts, I usually think of the scene from Star Wars where the characters are walking a seemingly endless voyage across a large desert area. I looked up where the scene was filmed and found the Death Valley National Park (Tatooine in the movie). This area is on the California-Nevada border, east of the Sierra Nevada, one of the most famous deserts in the US. The oldest rocks there are 1.7 billion years old. The valley is actually a graben (depressed block of the crust of a planet bordered by parallel faults). The temperature in Death Valley has reached 134 degrees Fahrenheit. 

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