Walker Lake
greg posted in non-technical posts, worlds on April 11th, 2007
Image Source
It’s hard to get a more profound sense of physical remoteness and isolation in the United States than to drive east from Walker Lake, Nevada as the Sun sinks below the western horizon. It’s like Mars.
On a transcontinental flight last month, I had a window seat away from the wing. The sky was clear over Nevada, and the sun angle was low. It was an ideal situation for high-resolution imaging of a habitable terrestrial planet. The airplane view provides an interesting link between the experience of driving across the landscape and examining the satellite photos. The area just east of Walker Lake imparts an impression of a planet that’s very different from the global idea of the “pale blue dot.” The lake itself is salty, alkaline.
Source: Google Maps
The satellite and aerial photographs show that Walker Lake seems to be an evaporating remnant of what was once a much larger body of water.
Four billion years ago, Gusev crater on Mars probably looked very similar, with a sour central lake receeding with bathtub-ring clockwork.
Image: NASA
On Mars, there are only a few spots where a high-level of zoom will reveal artificial features:
Image Source
On Earth, in the region to the East of Walker Lake, there’s very little that can’t be ascribed to natural processes. This smooth black curve seems to be a wave cut bench of the vanished shoreline:
This feature, however, would be more challenging for a planetary geologist to explain. It’s obviously younger than the channels that it cuts across. Perhaps it’s fresh material that welled up from a crack in the Earth’s crust? There are volcanos dotted across the Basin and Range province.
Just south of the region shown in the splash image for this post, there are some extremely strange landforms…
And as is often the case in planetary exploration, when one wants to see even more detail,
July 26th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
[...] I’d never really seen the Milky Way until I saw it on a perfectly clear and moonless July night from a spot just below the Arc Dome in central Nevada. It spills a swath of patchy luminosity that seems to split the sky in half; a barred spiral galaxy, seen edge-on, and from within. One hundred billion intensely glowing stars, like sand grain jewels, each separated by miles. The photo above (taken by Steve Jurvetson last weekend from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada) reminded me of that experience. [...]
June 29th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
[...] I remember stopping at a bar in Gabbs on a Saturday night in October 1993. We were low on gas, having foolishly skipped a possibility to fill up at Walker Lake. We’d been driving all day. In the deserted gravel lot, the sky was freezing black and spangled with stars. [...]