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Planetary Expeditions

A NASA fieldwork blog. The quest to understand our solar system begins at home.

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From the Archives: NASA’s Goddard Instrument Field Team at Long Valley Caldera

Editor’s note: This blog entry is adapted from NASA social media content originally published September 12-15, 2023.

Hello from NASA’s Goddard Instrument Field Team (GIFT for short)! In September 2023, we spent several days as guest researchers at California’s Long Valley Caldera and the Bishop Tuff, east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, studying the remains of an ancient supervolcano.

14 smiling people wearing high-visibility vests and sun hats, with a dramatic river gorge in the near background, and mountains on the distant horizon. The researcher in front and center of the group raises her hand with two fingers extended in a peace sign.
Goddard Instrument Field Team scientists at the edge of the Owens River Gorge. Back row L-R: Ernie Bell, John West, Jingchuan Wang, Sam Hudziak, Linden Wike, Jacob Giles, Naoma McCall, David Hollibaugh Baker, Stephen Scheidt, Patrick Whelley, David Crown. Front row L-R: Elisha Jhoti, Emileigh Shoemaker Thackston, Alexandra Matiella Novak.
NASA/Caela Barry

Long, long ago – think 760,000 years! – a column of ash, gas, and rocky debris blasted high into the sky above what is now central California. When the eruption column collapsed, hot debris flow and ashfall blanketed many square miles of Earth’s surface. The ground we’re standing on is what’s left of that ancient eruption.

Oblique aerial view looking towards the Sierra Nevada mountains on the horizon. At the foot of the mountains is (left) a flat area labeled “Long Valley Caldera” and (right) a region labeled “Inyo Craters”. Next closest to the camera is a smaller mountain range with three areas labeled: North Coulee, Crater Mountain, and South Coulee. Tucked at the foot of these mountains is a flatter zone labeled “Mono Craters”. Around the mountains, a road winds through flat land. In the foreground is a crater containing a lump labeled “Panum Dome” (right), and a small segment of waterline labeled “Mono Lake” (bottom left corner). An inset map indicates the pictured region’s location within the state of California: about halfway up, near the Eastern border.
Long Valley Caldera lies east of the Sierra Nevada, in central California.
USGS

Our task: learn how this caldera, or large volcanic crater, fits into the bigger story of past and present volcanic activity in our solar system. Earth isn’t the only place with an explosive history. Venus and Mars both show evidence of very large volcanoes, our own Moon has a volcanic past, and Jupiter’s moon Io is extremely volcanically active today. The Long Valley Caldera region has characteristics in common with large-scale volcanic terrains on Mars, and members of our team are working to learn how Arabia Terra’s super eruptions may have changed the Martian environment. If you want to understand volcanoes on other worlds (and we do), it helps to start close to home.

Three smiling people, wearing sun hats and high-visibility vests, at work in the desert. One researcher wears a harness attached to a box with cables coming out, and holds the edges of the box up in her hands. Two use a large handle to pull a flat, rectangular apparatus along behind them. Small shrubs are in the near background, and tall mountains are on the horizon. The sky is blue with white clouds.
Elisha Jhoti, Emileigh Shoemaker Thackston, and David Hollibaugh Baker use ground-penetrating radar to scan the subsurface of an ancient volcanic landscape.
NASA/Caela Barry

The Ground-Penetrating Radar or GPR Team (nickname: Team GRIT) carefully moves a radar antenna over the surface of the Volcanic Tableland to find out what’s underneath. We use a range of GPR antennae to reveal layers and features hidden underground. Larger antennae have a longer range, but they return lower-resolution data. Smaller antennae deliver higher-resolution images from closer to the surface.

Three researchers wearing bright colors in a rocky, shrubby desert. The person in the background swings a large mallet towards a metal square on the ground. The two people in the foreground, sitting on boxes of equipment and looking at a laptop shaded by a three-ring binder, cover their ears.
Jingchuan Wang uses a hammer and steel plate to shake the ground. The tremors from each impact travel down a line of sensors spread out over hundreds of feet of desert. Linden Wike and Jacob Giles prepare to monitor the data.
NASA/Caela Barry

“Team Seismic” strikes a metal plate with a hammer to generate tiny tremors and monitors the results in real time. We set up a long line of seismic activity detectors, called geophones, to measure the vibrations from each hammer strike. This helps us understand how the subsurface of the landscape is structured. The geophones are sensitive enough to measure footsteps, so everyone nearby pauses briefly during each test.

In the foreground, a small red plastic and metal object is driven into the desert ground next to a tape measure. A person wearing a high-visibility vest gives a thumbs-up. Blue mountains line the horizon behind her.
Naoma McCall gives the “all clear” for a seismic test.
NASA/Caela Barry

A hand-held spectrometer gives scientists on-the-spot information about the minerals each rock is made of. Mineral info, together with subsurface data from the Ground-Penetrating Radar and Seismic teams, helps us interpret Long Valley Caldera’s geologic history.

A researcher wearing a high-visibility vest and purple shirt uses one hand to place a portable science instrument against a rock outcrop. The device is orange and grey and resembles a large hair dryer with a digital readout screen. The scientist holds a small GPS unit in her other hand. Sage and yellow vegetation cover the near background. In the distance, mountains rise under a cloudy sky.
Alexandra Matiella Novak uses a hand-held spectrometer in the field.
NASA/Caela Barry

We’ve worked closely with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to operate in permitted areas and minimize the impact of our fieldwork on the environment. Below, BLM team members take a look at the data readout on our hand-held field spectrometer.

A person, wearing a high-visibility vest and sun hat and holding a field spectrometer in her hands, explains the instrument’s readout to two people wearing outdoor work clothes. In the background, another scientist smiles.
Alexandra Matiella Novak shows a field-portable spectrometer to representatives of the California Bureau of Land Management while Patrick Whelley works in the background.
NASA/Caela Barry

Meanwhile, “Team SHOVELS” studies the desert left behind by Mono Lake’s shrinking shoreline. The lake is evaporating; we trek across its dried outer reaches to sample the sediment where the water used to be.

Zach Morse, Patrick Casbeer, and Alex Michels collect and document 35 samples over the course of a mile near the edge of Mono Lake.
NASA/Caela Barry

Mono Lake has no natural outlets, so as it dries and shrinks, the water that’s left behind gets saltier and saltier. Gale Crater, where NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars, may once have been a closed, salty, evaporating lake, too. Fieldwork helps us understand both places better.

Aerial footage of the site is brought to you by the Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle or UAV team (field nickname: Team GLIDE). This group captures overhead views of the landscape and uses the data to create context videos & topographic maps for our teammates on the ground.

“Up, up, and away!” Stephen Scheidt, Sam Hudziak, and David Crown prepare for a UAV survey of the field site.
NASA/Caela Barry

Aerial and orbital views are critical tools for scientists studying Earth & beyond. From UAV data in the field to satellite images of our changing planet to maps of other worlds, a detailed, big-picture perspective can change everything.

Thanks for joining us! Keep learning about similar environments on different worlds, also called planetary analogs, at the link below.

Similar Landscapes, Different Worlds

About Planetary Analogs

Our planet isn't the only place with volcanoes, impact craters, quakes, and erosion. Studying extreme environments on Earth helps us to understand other worlds better, too.

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A researcher in a clean suit kneels in the desert, collecting samples.
NASA scientist Mary Beth Wilhelm collects soil samples from Chile’s Atacama Desert. Studying ancient life in the driest places on Earth helps us to understand conditions on Mars.
NASA