Hue Vietnam - Places of Interest

"Hue" means harmony.  Mirrored in the water of the Perfume river that flows quietly and shaded by the ancient palaces and other royal properties.  From 1802 to 1945 it was the ancient capital of the last dynasty of the Nguyen.  The town of Hue actually is inhabited by about 340,000 people on an area of approximately 6.777 hectares.  Recognized by UNESCO as the World Heritage, Hue attracts tourists thanks to its charm, rich architecture famous for the citadel, the palaces, the temples, the royal tombs that used to have a rich and exciting past.  It played not only the role of a political capital seated by the emperors for more than a century but also of the cultural development of the country.  It is "a masterpiece of urban construction". 


Amargosa Chaos

L. F. Noble, a pioneering Death Valley geologist, studied the jumbled rocks of the Virgin Spring area in the Black Mountains in the 1930s. He found this region so complexly faulted and folded, that he named this part of Death Valley the 'Amargosa chaos'. Later researchers found this area equally perplexing. It was not until geologists learned that this region had suffered from extraordinary tension that pulled great blocks of crust apart, that the background was laid to understand the intricate structure of the Amargosa Chaos.

Modern geologists have documented four major events (deformational events) that faulted and folded the Amargosa Chaos. The first event metamorphosed Death Valley's Precambrian basement rocks and was quite ancient, possibly occurring as long as 1,700 million years ago.

The second event began while layered younger Precambrian sediments were being deposited on top of the beveled surface of older metamorphic basement rocks. This deformational event shifted the crust vertically, creating thinning and thickening of some sedimentary layers as they were being deposited.

The two events responsible for the chaotic appearance of the Amargosa Chaos didn't occur until over half a billion years later, during Mesozoic or Early Tertiary time. This third event folded the layered Precambrian and Cambrian sedimentary rocks.

The fourth and final event occurred quite recently, geologically speaking. This phase of deformation coincided with severe crustal stretching that created the deep valleys and high mountains of this part of the Basin and Range province. In just a few million years, during Late Miocene to Pliocene time, older rocks were intensely faulted and sheared. In some areas all that remains of some thick rock layers are lens-shaped pods of rock bounded on all sides by faults. Other layers have been sliced out of their original sequence altogether.

Artist's Drive and Palette

Artist's Drive rises up to the top of an alluvial fan fed by a deep canyon cut into the Black Mountains. Artist's Palette is on the face of the Black Mountains and is noted for having various colors of rock. These colors are caused by the oxidation of different metals (red, pink and yellow is from iron salts, green is from decomposing tuff-derived mica, and manganese produces the purple).

Called the Artist Drive Formation, the rock unit provides evidence for one of the Death Valley area's most violently explosive volcanic periods. The Miocene-aged formation is made up of cemented gravel, playa deposits, and much volcanic debris, perhaps 5,000 feet (1500 m) thick. Chemical weathering and hydrothermal alteration are also responsible for the variety of colors displayed in the Artist Drive Formation and nearby exposures of the Furnace Creek Formation (see Zabriskie Point).

Badwater

Badwater is a salt flat that is beneath the face of the Black Mountains that contains the lowest point Western Hemisphere, some 282 feet (86 m) below sea level. The massive expanse of white is made up of almost pure table salt.

This pan was first created by the drying-up of 30-foot (10 m) deep Recent Lake 2000 to 3000 years ago. Unlike at the Devils Golf Course, significant rainstorms flood Badwater, covering the salt pan with a thin sheet of standing water. Each newly-formed lake doesn't last long though, because the 1.9 inch (48 mm) average rainfall is overwhelmed by a 150-inch (3800 mm) annual evaporation rate. This, the nation's greatest evaporation potential, means that even a 12-foot (3.7 m) deep, 30 mile (50 km) long lake would dry up in a single year. While flooded, some of the salt is dissolved, then is redeposited as clean, sparkling crystals when the water evaporates.

Charcoal Kilns

The Charcoal Kilns were built in 1867 and were used to reduce pinyon pine and juniper trees to charcoal in a process of slow burning in low oxygen. This fuel was then transported to mines in Death Valley to feed smelting and ore extraction operations.

The kilns were abandoned three years after they were built but were restored in 1971 by Navajo Indians from Arizona.

Pinion Pine and Juniper trees dominate the landscape here with bushes of Mormon Tea in between

Dante's View

From Dante's View one can see the central part ofDeath Valley from a vantage point  5,500
feet (1,700 m) above sea level. From here Badwater Basin can be seen, which contains the lowest dry point in North America. Telescope Peak can also be seen from here which is 11,331 feet (3455 m) above sea level. This is the greatest topographic relief in the conterminous U.S.

The mountain that Dante's View is on is part of the Black Mountains which along with the parallel Panamint Range across the valley form what geologists call a horst and the valley that is called a graben. These structures are created when the surface of the earth is under extensional, or a pulling force. The crust responds to this force by sending a large and long roughly v-shaped block of crust down which forms the bedrock of the valley floor (see Basin and Range).

Devil's Golf Course

The Devil's Golf Course is an area of salty mud that forms upturned sharp-edged crags that one person long ago thought creates an uneven and hellish surface that is suitable only for the devil to golf.

Not long ago, about 2000-4000 years ago during the Holocene, the climate was quite a bit wetter than today. It was so wet that water gradually filled Death Valley to a depth of almost 30 feet (10 m). The climate eventually warmed, rainfall declined, and the shallow lakes began to dry up. Minerals dissolved in the lake became increasingly concentrated as water evaporated. Eventually, only a briny soup remained, forming salty pools on the lowest parts of Death Valley's floor. Salts (95% table salt - NaCl) began to crystallize, coating the muddy lakebed with a three to five feet thick crust of salt.

While the saltpan at Badwater (see above) periodically floods, then dries, Devil's Golf Course lies in a part of the Death Valley salt pan that is several feet above flood level. Without the smoothing effects of flood waters, the silty salt at Devil's Golf Course grows into fantastic, intricately detailed pinnacles. The pinnacles form when salty water rises up from underlying muds. Capillary action draws the water upward where it quickly evaporates, leaving a salty residue behind. The pinnacles grow very slowly, perhaps as little as an inch (2.5 cm) in 35 years. Wind and rain continually work to erode and sculpt the salty spires into an amazing array of shapes.

Mesquite Sand Dunes

The Mesquite Sand Dunes are at the northern end of the valley floor and are nearly surrounded by mountains on all sides. Due to their easy access from the road and the overall proximity of Death Valley to Hollywood, these dunes have been used to film sand dune scenes for several movies including films in the Star Wars series. The largest dune is called Star Dune and is relatively stable and stationary because it is at a point where the various winds that shape the dunes converge. The depth of the sand at its crest is 130-140 feet (40-43 m) but this is small compared to other dunes in the area that have sand depths of up to 600-700 feet (180-210 m) deep. Star Dune is shaped like a starfish.

The primary source of the dune sands is probably the Cottonwood Mountains which lie to the north and northwest. The tiny grains of quartz and feldspar that form the sinuous sculptures that make up this dune field began as much larger pieces of solid rock.

In between many of the dunes are stands of creosote bush and some mesquite on the sand and on dried mud, which used to cover this part of the valley before the dunes intruded (mesquite was the dominant plant here before the sand dunes but creosote does much better in the sand dune conditions).

Ubehebe Crater

Ubehebe Crater is a large volcanic crater located at the north tip of the Cottonwood Mountains that is half a mile (one kilometer) wide, 500 to 777 feet (150 to 237 m) deep, and 4-7 thousand years old (Native American artifacts in the area indicate that 6000 years is the most likely age although estimates of 2000 years are common). "Ubehebe" (pronounced YOU-bee-HEE-bee) is a Native American word meaning "Big basket in the rock." The crater was formed when magma migrated close to the surface and the heat of the magma flashed groundwater into steam, throwing large quantities of pulverized old rock and new magma across the gravely alluvial fan draped across the valley floor. The magma rose through a fault that lies along the western base of Tin Mountain (movement on this fault was responsible for uplift of the entire Cottonwood mountain range).

The resulting large steam explosions are called a hydrovolcanic or phreatic eruption by geologists and the pits created are known as maars. Ubehebe was the last and largest in series of similar eruptions in the immediate area (its eruption exceeded the tensile strength of the bedrock by 10 times). Earlier eruptions created a group of much shallower maars to the south and another to the west. Little Hebe is a spatter cone that grew in the middle of one of the largest maars in the south group. The only significant deposit of lava in the volcanic field is contained in Little Hebe.

All of the maar-forming eruptions sent out fallout debris that mantled a broad area around the volcanic field (dozens of steam explosions issued from Ubehebe alone). The resulting light to dark gray cinder deposits consist of finely fragmented volcanic rock mixed with pulverized bedrock and are thickest immediately next to Ubehebe (80 feet; 25 m). Rills and gullies that were 15 to 20 foot (4.5 to 6 m) deep dissected the area prior to the eruptions and were buried by the fallout. Erosion has since re-excavated these features, exposing layers of cinder that still overlay adjacent ridges.

A type of pyroclastic flow called a base surge was sent out of Ubehebe by one of the explosions. It started after a large column of debris were thrown skyward began to collapse. A doughnut-shaped cloud of hot ash and gas (the base surge) sped 100 to 200 mph (160 to 320 km/h) from the base of the column while staying close to the ground, plastering the Ubehebe-facing side of all objects in the area.

Miocene-aged mostly reddish orange-colored conglomerate makes up the exposed bedrock in Ubehebe's walls. These sediments were deposited by streams and contain limestone, mudstone, quartzite and volcanic cobbles that are up to 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter. There is also a difference in color between these seabed sediments: On the left these sediments are yellowish in hue while on the right they are orange. The reason is due to a fault that separates the two different sedimentary units; over time at least 400 feet (120 m) of vertical displacement along this fault has resulted in the abutment of these two different sedimentary units. Fallout debris dip 30 feet (9 m) over the fault scarp on the pre-eruption surface but have not been offset by it. Within Ubehebe small alluvial fans have been built on the crater wall along with talus slumps from debris flows. White silt covers the crater bottom of Ubehebe and some surrounding craters.

A trail from the parking area goes to the bottom of Ubehebe, another circumnavigates the crater, while a third trail leads to Little Hebe. Winds at the rim of Ubehebe are very strong and often gust above 50 mph (80 km/h).