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Owens Valley is the arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States, to the east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin section. The mountain peaks on either side (including Mount Whitney) reach above in elevation, while the floor of the Owens Valley is at , making the valley one of the deepest in the United States. The Sierra Nevada casts the valley in a rain shadow, which makes Owens Valley "the Land of Little Rain." The bed of Owens Lake, now a predominantly dry endorheic alkali flat, sits on the southern end of the valley. The valley provides water to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the source of half of the water for Los Angeles, and is infamous as the scene of one of the fiercest and longest running episodes of the California Water Wars.〔 LADWP〕 These episodes inspired aspects of the film ''Chinatown''. Towns in the Owens Valley include Bishop, Lone Pine, Independence and Big Pine. The major road in the valley is U.S. Route 395. == Geology == About three million years ago, the Sierra Nevada Fault and the White Mountains Fault systems became active with repeated episodes of slip earthquakes gradually producing the impressive relief of the eastern Sierra Nevada and White Mountain escarpments that bound the northern Owens Valley-Mono Basin region. Owens Valley is a graben—a downdropped block of land between two vertical faults. Owens Valley is the westernmost graben in the Basin and Range Province. It is also part of a trough which extends from Oregon to Death Valley called the Walker Lane. The western flank of much of the valley has large moraines coming off the Sierra Nevada. These unsorted piles of rock, boulders, and dust were pushed to where they are by glaciers during the last ice age. An excellent example of a moraine is on State Route 168 as it climbs into Buttermilk Country.〔 This graben was formed by a long series of earthquakes, such as the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake, that have moved the graben down and helped move the Sierra Nevada up. The graben is in fact much larger than the depth of the valley suggests; gravity studies suggest that of sedimentary rock mostly fills the graben and that a very steep escarpment is buried under the western length of the valley. The topmost part of this escarpment is exposed at Alabama Hills. See also: Inyo and Mono Craters. Smaller versions of the Devils Postpile, can be found, for example, by Little Lake. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Owens Valley」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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