File:Mono Lake California.jpg

English: In eastern California, along the western edge of the Great Basin—one of North America’s four largest deserts—sits Mono Lake. This salty remnant of a wetter era resides in a landscape of geologically young and potentially active volcanoes.

On December 16, 1999, NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite captured this image of Mono Lake and its surroundings. The area immediately around the lake is relatively flat, especially in the northeast. On all sides of the lake, however, the terrain is rugged, especially the snowcapped mountain ridges in the west. Aside from the white snowcaps, the landscape limits its color palette to earthen tones with very little green. Although the nearby mountains can sport some vegetation in the summertime, this area is quite arid.

South of the lake appear some of the geologic features known as Mono Craters. Running along a roughly 16-kilometer (10-mile) north-south expanse, the Mono Craters may resemble old, dead volcanoes, but they are actually plug volcanoes—volcanoes whose previous lava flows cooled, hardened, and formed domes over the vents. Geologists estimate that the Mono Craters are less than 40,000 years old, and one or more of them could erupt in the future.