Thanks for that link. That looks pretty interestingtarchon said:Oddly enough, there was one of those, back when the Med basin mostly dried out in the Miocene, during the "Salinity Crisis". Wasn't quite that deep though. The Grand Canyon is a mile deep or so too, and it has a very substantial climate change from rim to floor.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Messinian-Salinity-Crisis
I hiked it in early spring - went from camping in 3 inches of snow on the south rim to shorts and t-shirt weather on the floor. The north rim is even cooler.Turjan said:Thanks for that link. That looks pretty interesting. I didn't know about this Nile bed detail.
The Grand Canyon is also a good example. I remember one of the last times I was there that it was pretty cold at the rim, and we were wearing jackets against the nasty weather, whereas at the bottom they had 110 F.
I can see hot (due to the +45F increase in heat), but dry depends on where it occurs. There are some notable sinkholes and canyons in the tropics that tend to be rather damp and steamy / foggy rather than dry. In regions where rain is common (the tropic: rain forest, and the sub-arctic: boreal taiga) it will be wet. In drier regions (~20-25 and around the poles) it will be bone dry. In most other regions it will vary with the seasons.tarchon said:For 3000 m below sea level, I'd have to vote for hot, dry, and flammable.
(It would incidentally have an O2 partial pressure similar to the late Cretaceous, if you like "Lost World" stuff.)
That's because partial pressures matter in chemistry, like tarchon said. Example: You suffocate on top of very high mountains, because the partial pressure of oxygen is too low, although the percentage is exactly the same as at sea level. Just extrapolate this to high partial pressures, and you see what tarchon talks about.Nyeshet said:As for the oxygen, I think the percentage (of total air volume) is more important than the increased air pressure. If the percentage is not much higher, if it is just more of the same, then why would the air be any more flamable?
If the OP will forgive a slight threadjack, what exactly is 'partial pressure'? I've been hearing it around for years, but nobody has been able to give me an explanation I could really assimilate.Turjan said:That's because partial pressures matter in chemistry, like tarchon said. Example: You suffocate on top of very high mountains, because the partial pressure of oxygen is too low, although the percentage is exactly the same as at sea level. Just extrapolate this to high partial pressures, and you see what tarchon talks about.
glass said:If the OP will forgive a slight threadjack, what exactly is 'partial pressure'? I've been hearing it around for years, but nobody has been able to give me an explanation I could really assimilate.

Hypoxicate.Steverooo said:At high altitudes, you breathe the same percentahes of each, but the Oxygen is basically too "spread out", so you don't get enough Oxygen in each breath of air. Hence, as previously pointed out, you suffocate (actually, I think there's technically another word for it, but I forget)...