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Lava Trail

WHOI graduate students and scientist explored a lava tube, a cave-like geological feature that channels lava away from eruption sites, during a field trip to Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument. The field trip culminated the 2015 Geodynamics Program, a semester-long series of seminars by scientists that this year focused on hydrothermal systems. Most hydrothermal vents are found in volcanic regions on the seafloor, but the group followed the track of the Yellowstone hotspot underneath the continental United States along the Snake River Plain to the still-active geysers and hydrothermal features of Yellowstone National Park.(Photo by Noelle Held, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)