Escalante (desert)
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The Escalante Desert is a desert plain in the southwest of the US state Utah in the United States of America . It is located in a trench in the Basin and Range Province northwest of Cedar City . With an area of approximately 7,800 km², it covers most of Iron County .
The desert was named after the Spanish Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante , who was the first European to set foot in what is now Utah on the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in 1775 .
geography
The highest parts of the desert region are in the southeast at a level of 1,700 m above sea level and slowly drop to the west to an average level of 1,550 m at Lund Flats . The average rainfall is around 200 mm annually.
The level is used by several traffic routes. In the west, the railway line from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas of the Union Pacific Railroad runs in a northeast-southwest direction with a junction to Cedar City. Interstate 15 runs to the southeast in the neighboring Cadar Valley and Parowan Valley . State Route 21 branches off to the west from here and runs through the north of the Escalante Desert and ends on US Highway 50 in neighboring Nevada . Further south, State Route 56 crosses the desert, starting in Cedar City on Interstate 15 and ending west on Interstate 93 .
ecology
According to the classification of the ecoregions by the Environmental Protection Agency , the Escalante Desert is Shadscale-Dominated Saline Basins with a very small embedded salt desert , the Lund Flats . The soils are dry and alkaline . There is only very little vegetation, the salt-tolerant species Atriplex confertifolia from the genus of the report serves as a pointer species . In addition come krascheninnikovia and sarcobatus vermiculatus from the kind sarcobatus ago.
Agricultural use takes place only through extensive grazing . In isolated cases there is arable farming with the help of artificial irrigation.
Inhabitants and usage
There are two former settlements in the desert, Lund and Beryl. They were created during the construction of the railway line, travelers to Cedar City had to get off here, first in carriages, later on to buses. After the branch line to Cedar City was built, the settlements fell into disrepair and are now considered ghost towns . They are recorded with scattered settlements in the region and Beryl Junction as a census-designated place ; a total of 197 people lived in the region in the 2010 US Census .
In the south, between Enterprise , Newcastle and Beryl Junction , part of the desert is artificially irrigated and used for agriculture . In 2005, three large crevices were discovered in this part of the desert . The formation of crevices is attributed to subsidence due to the extraction of groundwater for irrigation. To the north of the plain there is a smaller irrigated area around Milford .
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Stuart Allan: California Road and Recreation Atlas . Benchmark Maps, 2005, ISBN 0-929591-80-1 , p. 7 The West.
- Jump up ↑ Chapman, DS, MD Clement, CW Mase, Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah : Thermal Regime of the Escalante Desert, Utah, With an Analysis of the Newcastle Geothermal System . August 21, 1981. Retrieved December 27, 2010. (J. Geophys. Res., 86 (B12), 11735 ff.)
- ↑ Environmental Protection Agency: Ecoregions Level IV - Utah ,
- ↑ Ghosttowns.com: Lund and Beryl , accessed September 13, 2019
- ^ William R. Lund, Southern Utah Office: Earth Fissures near Beryl Junction in the Escalante Desert . December 21, 2005. Archived from the original on December 17, 2005. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 27, 2010.
Coordinates: 37 ° 55 ′ N , 113 ° 30 ′ W