At its peak, historic Lake Bonneville would have been a sight to behold. Almost as giant as Lake Michigan, the Ice Age lake unfold throughout a lot of western Utah and components of Nevada and Idaho. When it will definitely receded, it left behind flat, brilliant playas and salt flats wealthy with minerals—a panorama that will later function the setting for feats of engineering and technological ingenuity, in addition to epic tales of exploration and desperation.
Lake Bonneville started forming about 55,000 years in the past throughout a cool, moist interval, when volcanic eruptions in what’s now southeastern Idaho diverted the Bear River, inflicting water to assemble in Gem Valley and different basins to the south. For tens of 1000’s of years, a pure dam at Pink Rock Cross helped confine the lake.
Then, about 18,000 years in the past, water breached that dam, unleashing a torrent that entered the Columbia River system. Over a six-week interval, amid one among North America’s largest floods, lake ranges plummeted by greater than 350 toes (105 meters). Because the local weather warmed and dried in subsequent millennia, the lake shrank dramatically, leaving remnants that embody right now’s Nice Salt Lake, Utah Lake, and Sevier Lake.
Lake Bonneville could also be gone, however its imprint on the area’s panorama stays—even in satellite tv for pc imagery. On this picture (beneath) captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite tv for pc, bathtub-like rings and wave-cut terraces hint the place of former shorelines. The dried lakebed—the place fine-grained clay, marl, and sandy sediment settled out of the water—seems pale compared to the darker, rockier, extra vegetated environment.
In deep components of the basin, the place runoff and groundwater nonetheless pool, brilliant deposits of evaporite minerals coat the land surfaces, forming salt flats. These remarkably flat surfaces are the product of water step by step evaporating and concentrating minerals to supply brines and exhausting mineral crusts, usually together with halite and gypsum, together with potassium- and magnesium-bearing salts. Brines and deposits like these—notably of potash, which is used as a fertilizer—have lengthy made the playa a goal for mining, as seen within the rectangular evaporation ponds above and beneath.
In distinction, the darker, extra rugged terrain—together with the Silver Island Mountains, the Newfoundland Mountains, and the Pilot Vary—that rises above the playas is constructed from layers of erosion-resistant sedimentary and metasedimentary bedrock that’s tons of of thousands and thousands of years outdated. These mountains additionally include youthful igneous and metamorphic rocks that fashioned when magma intruded into the traditional sedimentary sequence.
Crater Island, as an illustration, consists of sedimentary rocks, together with silica-rich sandstones and quartzites that fashioned as sands amassed in a shallow ocean, in addition to intrusions of quartz monzonite, granites, and different igneous rocks. Durations of crustal stretching later produced the fault-block mountains that outline the panorama.
Mapping geological distinctions like this took heart stage in June 2026 when NASA scientists and engineers working with the company’s DAVINCI mission got here to Crater Island—a spot they name “Venus on Earth”—to field-test the design of a set of cameras and a bundle of devices that can finally descend via the thick environment of Venus and {photograph} mountains at scales finer than these Landsat pictures. Throughout a 60-minute descent, the pioneering probe will seize near-infrared pictures, measure the atmospheric chemistry, and discover the surroundings of a world in unprecedented element.
In the course of the rehearsals at Crater Island, the digital camera system took tons of of pictures of assorted rock formations, together with iron-rich and silica-rich rock items, whereas suspended from a helicopter because it descended towards the floor. Utilizing solely the photographs acquired by DAVINCI’s digital camera programs, the workforce made three-dimensional maps of the realm in line with current geologic maps, giving the scientists confidence that they may be capable of map the geology of an identical mountainous area on Venus that DAVINCI will examine, an space referred to as Alpha Regio.
Different epic adventures have performed out on and round Lake Bonneville’s playas, as effectively. The flat, easy surfaces have typically been the setting for brand spanking new land velocity information. In 1960, Mickey Thompson turned the primary American to interrupt the 400-miles-per-hour (640Â kilometers-per-hour) barrier, hitting 406.60 miles per hour (654.36Â kilometers per hour) in a streamlined race automobile on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The feat quickly earned him the nickname “quickest man on Earth.”
Extra not too long ago, in August 2026, Andy Inexperienced, the primary particular person to interrupt the sound barrier on land, set a file for the quickest land velocity in a hydrogen-fueled internal-combustion automobile, reaching 406.320 miles per hour (653.909 kilometers per hour). By burning hydrogen fairly than gasoline, the “rocket automobile” produced no carbon dioxide.
Almost two centuries earlier, in August 1846, members of the ill-fated Donner-Reed Social gathering additionally handed alongside the southern fringe of Crater Island. As a part of a shortcut towards Pilot Peak, they journeyed from Hastings Cross, previous Floating Island, and towards Donner Spring. Nevertheless, in an ominous signal of challenges to return, their heavy wagons broke via the skinny salt crust and have become mired in underlying mud, slowing them down and prompting them to desert a number of wagons within the desert.
NASA Earth Observatory pictures by Michala Garrison, utilizing Landsat information from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
June 4, 2026: Indirect map
- The Middle for Land Use Interpretation, Intrepid Potash Wendover. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- Garvin, J.B., et al. (2022) Revealing the Mysteries of Venus: The DAVINCI Mission. The Planetary Science Journal, 3(117).
- Hill Air Power Base (2026, January 28) Traces of Journey: Donner-Reed Wagon Websites on the Hastings Cutoff. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- Idaho State College, Lake Bonneville Flood. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- NASA (2026, July 14) Utah Helicopter Flights Take a look at NASA’s DAVINCI Mission to Venus. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- NASA, DAVINCI. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- NASA Earth Observatory (2018, February 25) Bonneville Salt Flats. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- Nationwide Park Service, Donner and Reed Wagon Prepare Incident. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- Utah Geological Survey, Lake Bonneville. Accessed August 21, 2026
- Utah Geological Survey, Geologic Historical past. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- Utah Geological Survey, Nice Salt Lake and Lake Bonneville. Accessed August 21, 2026.
- Utah Division of Pure Assets (1990) Geologic Map of the Lucin 4 SW Quadrangle. Accessed August 21, 2026.