Diversion
In 1941 a 5-foot-deep (1.5 m) Furnace Creek-Gower Gulch Flood diversion channel was blasted upstream from Zabriskie Point to divert flood waters from the Furnace Creek Wash and the resorts into Gower Gulch. The diversion increased the size of Gower Gulch's drainage basin from 2.77 km2 to 455.63 km2, an increase of 16,348%. As a result, massive erosion of the channel took place as debris from Furnace Creek were channeled into Gower Gulch. Today the diversion has sunk to over 20 feet deep with two dry falls, one three feet and another ten feet high.
Read more about this topic: Gower Gulch (Death Valley)
Famous quotes containing the word diversion:
“Without [diversion] we would be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us on to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“[F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“If our condition were truly happy, we would not need diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)