Death Valley elevation is 0 ft?

Michael Foster
Why do below sea level places display an elevation of 0 ft instead of a negative elevation value? Shaded relief and slope angle shading show the topographic features that are below sea level but it would be nice to know their elevations.
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    Matt Jacobs

    This is an artifact of importing bathymetry data into our elevation dataset.  Our elevation dataset has ground-level negative elevations in places like Death Valley, and underwater negative elevations in some coastal areas.  Our terrain shading tool can use these underwater elevations to produce some interesting visualizations, but we decided to keep the displayed elevation as 0', as that felt like the better of two sub-optimal outcomes: either showing negative values instead of 0 near coastlines, or limiting elevations to 0 in places like Death Valley.

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