The North American Great Basin is a huge area in the West centered on the State of Nevada where the rivers and lakes have no outlet to the sea. As a result, the lakes lose water only by evaporation and build up very high levels of dissolved minerals (salinity and alkalinity). The Basin is more or less bounded by the Great Salt Lake in the Northeast, Lake Tahoe in the Northwest, Death Valley in the Southwest and the complex of sites around the Nevada Test Site in the Southeast. The rivers in the Basin either run into lakes or simply sink into the ground, and many of the lakes are less than "permanent," varying greatly in depth and size according to rainfall. At present, the lakes in the Basin cover about 2.5 million acres.
Toward the end of the last ice age (16 thousands years ago), the glaciers covered the northern part of the West as well as the Midwest and East, but stopped short of the Great Basin. The climate in the Basin was cooler and moister,and the lakes were much larger, covering about 10 times as many acres as they do today. The two largest were Lake Bonneville (ancestor of the Great Salt Lake) and Lake Lahontan (ancestor of Mono, Walker, and Pyramid Lakes, among others.) See the Map of Pluvial Lakes which reconstructs things as of 16,000 years ago.
It is a matter of debate exactly when the First Peoples crossed over the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, but the Clovis culture was well established in the Basin by 11,000 years ago. Today, the region is home to several nations(Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, and others as indicated on the map), all of whom speak very closely related languages. Sometimes the term Great Basin Region is used on the basis of ethnographic similarities between the peoples of the Basin and a number of nations somewhat to the east of the hydrological Basin.
The region is also home to the huge complex of military sites around the Nevada Test Site (including Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range and the Yucca Flats and Mountain). Altogether, they occupy over 5,000 square miles in southern Nevada beginning about 60 miles north of Las Vegas. The Nevada Test Site was the principle site for US atmospheric and underground testing of nuclear weapons. Despite the fame of the Trinity site near Alamagordo, NM, the NTS rapidly became the mother of all test sites: over 900 nuclear bombs and warheads have been detonated there.
Maps and text based mainly on Donald K. Grayson's The Desert's Past: A Natural Prehistory of the Great Basin Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
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