Why Mojave Desert Is Sitting On The Most Valuable Land In Human History

The Mojave is not a desert that happened to have things buried in it. It is a slab of continental crust being physically pulled apart, and every valuable thing on top of it — the borax, the rare earths, the lakebed runways, the solar — is a by-product of that same stretch. Starting around 17 million years ago the western edge of North America began extending. The crust thinned, cracked, and broke into tilted blocks: ranges on one edge, basins dropping between them. Many of those basins have no outlet to the sea, which means every mineral that ever washed off the mountains went in and never came out. Hundreds of thousands of years of evaporation later, the floor of the desert is a chemical deposit. 25 facts, counted down, from a plate boundary quietly relocating inland to a single open pit beside a highway that once supplied essentially the entire world's rare earth elements — and is today the only operating rare earth mine in the United States. CHAPTERS 0:00 A desert that is actually crust coming apart 0:51 #25-24 Stretching crust and the Basin and Range 2:23 #23 The Eastern California Shear Zone 3:05 #22 Cima, Amboy and the volcanic Mojave 3:51 #21-20 Closed basins and why the chemistry stays 5:14 #19-18 Badwater and the lowest point in North America 6:28 #17 Why Death Valley is the hottest place on Earth 7:09 #16 The Racetrack - the rocks that move by themselves 7:56 #15-14 Borax, the 20-mule teams and borosilicate glass 9:00 #13 Searles Lake - a dry lake that is a chemical plant 9:38 #12-11 Mountain Pass and the rare earth elements 11:42 #10 The pit that supplied the entire planet 12:23 #9 Gold in the fractured crust 12:54 #8-7 King Clone and the Joshua tree 14:15 #6 The aqueducts that made southern California 14:45 #5 Hoover Dam and Lake Mead 15:22 #4 Las Vegas - a city on a pipe 15:55 #3 The best solar resource in the United States 16:29 #2 Rogers Dry Lake - a playa that became a runway 17:16 #1 One accident, and everything else is a consequence WHAT'S COVE