Wow that was great!
Most people around here know that you can
go sledding at White Sands National Monument,
but there are a lot of other wow things too.
It's the only place like it on earth.
It is truly unique.
My name is Eugene Ibarra and I'm a park ranger
here at White Sands.
I'm going to tell you about where the white
gypsum sand came from.
Picture me at the bottom of the sea because
250 million years ago was at the bottom of
the sea.
I can't even imagine that many years ago,
can you?
Our sugar like sand is made of gypsum.
Most people know gypsum as a rock or s crystal.
Gypsum is rarely found as a sand.
The huge amount of sand here is the result
of the sea covering the area for millions
of years, wow!
I just jumped ahead 180 million years.
The sea is long long gone.
It is now 70 million years ago when the Rocky
Mountains formed.
That jump puts me 30 million years ago.
The land that White Sands is on now sinks
down about nine thousand feet.
The area that sinks becomes the Tularosa basin
and becomes like a bath tub without a drain.
That means the water that comes into this
basin stays in the basin until it evaporates.
There is no river to carry the gypsum away,
this special bath tub without a drain is one
of the very few basins that was covered by
an ocean for hundreds of millions of years,
it is another wow!
Now we're about 24 thousand years ago.
The climate was cooler and wetter, a huge
lake covered a big part of the Tularosa basin,
mammoths giant camels, and sloths, and dire
wolves lived here.
They lived in a much wetter and colder place
than what the Tularosa basin is like today.
All the rain washed the gypsum off the mountains
down to the huge lake and it stayed there,
and so there was a lot of gypsum in that water.
That's a wow!
Around ten thousand years ago the huge lake
dried up, that left behind a lot of selenite,
which is gypsum in crystal form, wow!
Selenite is so soft it can be scratched by
your fingernail.
The crystals break into smaller and smaller
pieces, eventually they are small enough to
be blown by the wind.
Seven thousand years ago the gypsum dunes
started to form, wow that's a lot of sand.
Here is the biggest wow for today.
The combination of this land being under the
sea, the land becoming a bathtub without a
drain, the huge lake collecting lots of gypsum
that washed off the mountains, that huge lake
drying up when the climate got hotter, and
the selenite crystals being broken down into
sand.
All of this has resulted in the biggest gypsum
sand dune field on earth.
No other gypsum dune field even comes close
in size, wow!
So now you know there is a whole lot more
to White Sands than sledding.
And there's even more to learn about this
unique place, the special plants and animals,
all kinds of amazing things.
Hope your class can visit us soon, either
by field trip or by computer.
We can promise you you'll have fun.
See you later!
