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Badwater pool is salty. It is home to one of Death Valley's rarest animals: the badwater snail. These tiny mollusks exist only in a few springs at the edge of Death Valley salt flats.
Ancient water fills the pool year-round. Much of it began as ice age snow and rain hundreds of miles away in the mountains of central Nevada. The runoff seeped into porous limestone bedrock and began a long underground flow through a regional aquifer. It emerges here at badwater along the faultline at the mountain's base. Salts dissolve from old deposits and flow to the surface, making the spring water "bad".