Exploring the Solar System from the Comfort of Earth

One of the big things I like to do, the title of my talk is Exploring the Solar System from the Comfort of Earth. So it's really hard to get out to these ocean worlds. And I'll describe a little bit more about what they are and how we can actually simulate them in the lab and go maybe try to study them in the field on Earth. So it's really a great thing to figure out, like, how can we study these places if they're so difficult to get to? It can take decades to get both a mission funded and then actually to transport ourselves out there. And right now, we as humans cannot go visit these places. So we have to come up with other techniques for doing that. So, yeah, my name is Bethany Teeling. I am a research scientist in the Planetary Environments Laboratory, and my primary work is as a geochemist. So I do lots of different things, but I love oceans, and that's kind of been the theme for my entire life. So I figured I'd just start out with, like, a little bit about me. So how did I get here? I will say the big reason I'm here is because of my dad. My dad is a marine biologist. He has been a sea captain. He's been a tugboat captain. He's been a deep sea diver. He's done so many different things. And so for most of my life, I really thought that I was going to be a marine biologist just like him, or I would be, like, actually diving into these depths of Earth. So, strangely enough, as I started doing these kinds of research, you know, in my undergraduate, and then later on as a graduate student, I realized that there's so much to be learned just from Earth's deposits of the oceans. So you may or may not know this, but we have millions, hundreds of millions of years worth of record, of a geologic record that actually records the oceans and what they were like over that amount of geologic time. So a lot of the early work that I've done, and some of this work I still do, is actually on those records on Earth of ancient oceans on Earth. And we can use those as analogs to try to think about how these processes would be represented on a different planet or on a different moon. And so the picture that you're looking at on the right here, obviously, this is my dad, not this guy right here, but with him. So if we look on the right here, this whole section on the top, that is actually ancient ocean, and underneath it is actually ancient riverbeds right here. So it's fascinating to look at this transition over, you know, I think in this case, it's tens of millions of years of time where something was on the land, and then sea level rose, and you actually have ocean deposits there. So a lot of my work has been on that as well. Okay, so I've said this word a couple of times, what is an ocean world? And I have a deep passion for ocean worlds. And I'll say that my favorite ocean world is Earth. So we consider any planet or moon that has liquid water or ice water to be an ocean world. So I've got a couple of examples up here. You know, as I said, my favorite is Earth, and I'm trying to give you kind of a size difference here. So hopefully they're pretty close to kind of a comparison on size. We have Earth here in the background. I know that the word's a little bit small. So this is Callisto. It's a moon of Jupiter. Ganymede, which is also a moon of Jupiter. Titan, which is a moon of Saturn. Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter. And then Triton, which is a moon of Neptune, actually. And this little guy way out here is Enceladus, which is a moon of Saturn. And I'll be talking a little bit more about Enceladus in a few minutes. So I've got the list up here. Now, there are other places in the solar system that can be considered an ocean world. And I'm going to talk about one of them today, too. So it doesn't look like an ocean world. All of these systems that I pointed to, they all have some liquid water somewhere. So that liquid water could be on the surface, like on Earth, or it could be under layers of ice or rock. And that's the case for all of these moons here. So we have at least some evidence of that somewhere. The other one I'm alluding to is Mars. And Mars, you know, we call it the Red Planet. We haven't found any evidence of, like, flowing water or ice sheets. We have carbon dioxide ice on Mars, but not quite liquid water ice. We found evidence of water flowing and very, very salty solutions flowing. So we have a high potential. But the reason that we considered it an ocean world is because the Northern Hemisphere, so this whole section up here, has evidence that suggests that it was once covered by water. And so you can consider it an ocean world in some cases. So I'm going to start off by talking about a little bit about habitability. Like, why do I even care about water or ocean worlds, besides Earth being super cool, which is my favorite planet? So why study ocean worlds? So, first of all, we know that life on Earth requires water. And that's one of the biggest things. So I know, you know, one of NASA's major goals is to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe. It's a lofty goal and not an easy one. And so we're kind of looking toward what kinds of places might have life. It probably doesn't look like us, but at least we'd like to know if there are other living things out there. So we know that water, this is my first point here, water is abundant in the solar system. We found it in lots of different places. And outside of our solar system, I would add, and it's really versatile. So water allows molecules to move around. It promotes chemical reactions. You can, it helps create complex molecules, which can help form interesting bodies like ourselves and also other kinds of liquids, which are kind of strange. So ammonia could be a liquid. Some of you guys might know of ammonia and hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. These are liquids and they could also promote those kinds of processes. It helps our joints move around. It helps flush toxins from our system. It helps keep us cool or keep us warm. So it regulates our temperature. So it's really, really important. And it's incredibly important, not only for us complex animals, but for very, very simple animals and organisms as well. Okay, so one of the things you have to think about if we're going outside of Earth, now we know that there's life on Earth, right? We have our one data point. It's that pale blue dot in the sky and that's us. So a lot of the times there's this comparison that you may or may not have heard of, but in planetary science, there's a comparison between Earth and Venus. Earth and Venus are very similar sizes. They have very similar processes or did. And probably if you're looking at the screen here, and I hope that you are, you'll see that there's pretty stark differences between the two. So you can't tell from the figure on the left, but Venus also has this very, very thick atmosphere. So what you're looking at is a radar image, and it's the only way that we're able to get an idea of what the surface looks like. So you have to be able to look through all of these clouds that are on Venus. So like Earth on the right, you can see that there's lots of clouds. We have an atmosphere that has nice, breathable air for us. Venus may have once had conditions like Earth, but it is too hot. So a lot of its water boiled off. Now it has this really in-hospital atmosphere. So let's think about what is a hospitable environment. What is it habitable? What makes the world habitable? So the major requirements are water, we think, and all of these are moving hypotheses. So it's as we learn more about life on Earth, some of these things have shifted. It's entirely possible that some of you in the audience maybe learned about what's called the Goldilocks hypothesis. This is a hypothesis that was formed several decades ago and really stood the test of time for a long time. And the idea was that Earth just happens to be just far enough away from the sun, but just close enough to the sun to have liquid water, to have a nice warm environment, but not too hot. It also rotates on an axis so one side doesn't get too hot or too cold. So it was the Goldilocks zone. We no longer think that that is required for a habitable environment. And so these things are moving hypotheses. Science updates all the time. And so it's one of the fun parts, I think, about being a scientist is that I get to think about, well, is this the right way to think now that we've learned a lot more? So currently, we still think that water is a requirement, or at least some kind of solvent, something that dissolves things, so we can move those nutrients around. We also think that you have to have kind of these essential building blocks for life. So many of you all may have heard, like, we are carbon-based life forms. And so you have this acronym on the right. Some people say shnops or chinops, or schnops, I've heard a couple of times. So however you like to say it, but it's carbon, C, H is hydrogen, N is nitrogen, O oxygen, P phosphorus, and S sulfur. So these are found in all living things on Earth. And so we think they must be required for life, at least life like us. The next requirement is light, or sorry, is energy. So that could be photosynthetics energy, like light, or chemical energy. So, you know, we take in plants, they are photosynthetic, and we create chemical energy out of that. And then you have to have a mechanism for transferring nutrients. This is a tough one, because if you think about it, if things go in one direction, so let's say that you have a tank of gas, right? And you're using that tank of gas, and eventually it runs out, and then you're done, you're stuck. So you have to have a way to refill the tank effectively. So you have to think about how do you get new nutrients into that cycle, into that body. So these are the really important parts. Okay, so after thinking about all that, it turns out Earth is a great place to think about this, because we have so many different kinds of environment. So if you think about it, we have polar ice caps, and we have Antarctica, we have deep sea oceans, we have deserts, we have grasslands, we have forests, we have caves. There are so many incredible environments on Earth. So it's a great place. You just have to be very specific about your scientific question. And I just wanted to show you guys this, and it kind of ties into the geologic record, like that big cliff face that I was showing you earlier. So this is actually a satellite image of a plankton bloom off the coast of England. So that's this like milky looking material here. And if you look at them under a microscope, they are called coccolithophores. That's that weird word right here, coccolithophore. And they are made out of plates. So each one of these strange looking plates here is one crystal made of calcium carbonate. And so that's Ca, calcium, CO3, and that's carbon and three oxygens. So they actually store carbon dioxide and help regulate climate. I mean, this is one of those things. This is why Earth is my favorite ocean world, because it's so fascinating that we regulate climate through these incredible little organisms that make shells, these little plates. Okay, let's talk about one of my other favorite ocean worlds, Enceladus. And I think I'm going to stop right there just to make sure, Stacy, is there any questions that I should field right now? I do not. Can you come in? Okay, perfect. You're good to go. Okay, excellent. Thank you. All right, so let's move on to Enceladus. Enceladus is the moon of Saturn. And I would like to, I'm just going to pause here for a moment. And I want you to look at this picture and say to yourself, or hey, if you want to type in the chat, what is the most striking thing to you about this image? I'll give you a few seconds. Okay, so I'll let Stacy come in. If anybody is typing anything, I'll let her field that. But Enceladus, when I talk to people about Enceladus a lot, a couple of things come to mind. And I'm always fascinated to see what comes to people's mind first. So some people say that there's these big cracks or rivers, they think, right here in this picture. So there's these like long blue, darker blue streaks on the surface of this. They're actually cracks. They do look, from this image, a little bit like a river, but there's these big cracks. They're called tiger stripes. The other thing that people notice is that it does have these craters right here. So this image is a little bit misleading because we're kind of rotating it up toward ourselves. So imagine that this is actually the south pole of Enceladus. We've kind of rotated the image so that you can see the bottom a little bit, the south pole a little bit. So the northern hemisphere has all these craters on it, but the southern hemisphere doesn't really have any craters on it. And this is a fascinating feature to see. Did we discover that this is all ice? So there's no continents on this. It's entirely made of ice on the surface, as far as we understand. Underneath it, based on other kinds of data, it looks like, and this is our best hypothesis until we get back out there, which hopefully is coming soon. But the best hypothesis is that there's a global ocean underneath that ice shell. So very different kind of place from Earth. Earth has these continents that kind of pop up out of the ocean. But Enceladus doesn't seem like it does that. Enceladus is very small. Remember from that image of all the ocean worlds kind of put together. The other striking thing about Enceladus is that it has these water plumes that come out of the surface. So out of those tiger stripes, those big, oops, these big cracks in the surface, we actually were able to observe and take images and video, I would say, of these plumes. So it's basically water material coming out of the surface, from the subsurface of Enceladus. And the image here, this is not real color blue. This is just to help you see it a little bit more. This is more of a true image. And so basically, you see that the brightness of this, it's not that it's hot. It's that you're actually seeing the sun passing through the plume in the back. So it looks like it's really bright back there. But Enceladus' plumes, these are going off kind of all the time, it turns out. As near as we've observed, they're going off all the time. And you can see that there's really, really bright spots and then lesser bright spots that are kind of around. And they have lots of cool things coming out of them. So first of all, it's water, which was really a groundbreaking discovery at the time that these moons of Saturn could have water ejecting from the interior. The next really cool thing is that there's carbon dioxide. So that's the CO2, carbon dioxide coming out of it. The next thing is sodium chloride, that's NaCl, and sodium bicarbonate. And these are salts. So the interesting thing about this is that it's very similar in a lot of ways to Earth's oceans. So we thought that was a pretty interesting discovery, is that we don't know exactly how salty it is, but it was also interesting that it did have kind of a similar composition. And the next one is methane and hydrogen and then organics. And so all of these things, you know, a lot of scientists started going, oh, wow, this could be a really important place to go, which is why many of us scientists would love to go back. And just to give you guys a perspective, because I know it's so hard to think about how big are these things. So here's a picture of Old Faithful. I know lots of people have seen Old Faithful or at least an image of it. And so, you know, you could stand nearby and see the top of Old Faithful, right? So it's 0.03 to 0.06 kilometers high. I know, you know, often kilometers is not a measurement that we're used to in the U.S. But if we compare that, Enceladus' plumes can be, you know, 80 kilometers high. I would say most people agree 60 to maybe 100 plus kilometers high. So these are enormous and they're ejecting into space. And the image that I'm showing you here is actually taken from Cassini, sorry, by Cassini on its very last go around. So right before it dove into Saturn, which was 2017, I believe, it took one last look longingly at Enceladus and took this image. And so, and actually there's a little GIF of it somewhere out there on the Internet. So you can see the plumes ejecting into space. And just so you can see, I kind of put a bar here. So this is Enceladus' plume height. And then I tried to put this teeny little dot for Old Space Ball. But that's still too big to compare them correctly. All right. Other cool things about Enceladus' plumes. So we also were able to just discover that they are hot. They're not very hot at the surface. I put quotes around that for a good reason. So the text I have down here is that they are negative 135 degrees Fahrenheit. At the hottest part. This is at the surface, not at the base. So it could be, some of the calculations have suggested that it could be upwards of, you know, 200 degrees Celsius at the seafloor. But we only see the surface. So it's still extremely cold, negative 134 degrees Fahrenheit. And then outside is a very cool negative 330 degrees Fahrenheit. So much, much cooler than something like we're used to. So these are very unusual environments, right? They're not like sunlight we have on Earth. And the image that I'm showing on the right-hand side, these circles are just showing you discrete locations that we were able to say, like, plume came from this point right here, or this, within this circle. So that's what it's showing you. You also may have noticed that we named them. So we've got Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus. That's the names of the tiger stripes. Now, from all of this evidence, we kind of were able to piece together what could the interior look like. And so we're basing this off of Earth analogs, actually. So basically, earlier I said there's hydrogen, and there's carbon dioxide. We detected it in the plumes. We also have things that are, there's silica particles. So if you imagine quartz crystals, they're not exactly like that, but they're little particles. These are the kinds of, all of these gases and the particles are the kinds of things that you would find at active hydrothermal vents. And these are areas in Earth's environment, in Earth's oceans, where you have very, very cold water seeping down through the rock, warming up, and then coming back through the rock and altering the rock as that happens. And so similar kinds of places on Earth are the pictures I'm showing you here. This is called Lost City. So Lost City, it's a hydrothermal field in the Atlantic. And you can see everything is very white here. So it has this, like, whitish precipitation. And these are called white smokers. Some of you may have heard of black smokers. It's a similar process, but with different chemistry. So it makes black smoke instead of white smoke. And you can see a really great example of those, that white smoke coming out here. And all that means is that there's just so much, there are so many minerals saturating the water that when they hit the seawater around it, it immediately precipitates out. It becomes a mineral immediately because it's so saturated. So this is a model of what the interior of Enceladus could look like. We call this a profile. So it's basically like cutting a slice through Enceladus. So you have this ice shell here with the plumes or geysers, some people call them geysers, exiting through probably cracks, these big cracks in the surface. And that's all because you have really, really warm environments at the base that are sort of building up pressure and heat and eventually releasing there. And I'm sure some of you guys are going, why is it so cold out there? Why would you even have heat? And the reason is because Saturn, sitting out here in the background, Saturn is pulling on Enceladus. So it has this massive tidal pull and it's actually pulling so hard on Enceladus that it's actually heating the interior. And that's how you get that process occurring. So how does this translate to anything that we do on Earth besides going and going to Lost City and other white smoker fields? So how do I do this in the lab? I haven't been to Lost City. All right. Well, this is some of my laboratory experiments. So I actually take these sorts of conditions and I recreate them in the lab. So what you're seeing on the left is another cutaway for that profile. So here's the seafloor and you can see it says carbon dioxide outgassing. So that same process where you're heating the seafloor, you're actually releasing not just minerals, but gases as well. So you have all of these things are being released. And you can see hopefully from this image that it's really, really warm and it kind of eventually gets cooler and cooler as it goes up. Those gases eventually leave. And they could either leave through the ice very slowly so they can move through the ice slowly or they could be ejected into space. So my big question is, okay, let's say that we send spacecraft out there to Enceladus again, or we're already going to Europa. Europa is another ocean world of Jupiter. And we're going to be flying that mission very soon, in about a year. I think it's October 2024. So look forward to that. That's going to be really exciting. But what do we do with that data once we get there? How does it... This quote I have in the middle, it's sort of my driving goal. How well do the gases we measure way out here using those spacecraft, how do they reflect what's going on deep inside the system? What does it mean? And so I basically recreate these systems in the lab. So here's a big test tube. I do these in lots of different kinds of containers. But the one I'm showing you is a test tube. And basically all of these things in here are just trying to say, I'm changing the chemistry of the system. We have a lot of hypotheses that are pretty well constrained about what we think it's composed of. And so I change what that chemistry is. Is it more Earth-like? Is it more like different kinds of places on Earth? Or is it very weird and just not like anything we have on Earth? So I change the chemistry a lot and then I measure basically what a spacecraft would see. So if a spacecraft was measuring that system, what would it see based on different kinds of systems? And so honestly, this is what it looks like in the lab. I make a lot of different kinds of seawaters. I have a great lab technician who also helps me out because, as you can see, we have racks and racks and racks of these samples. So we make a lot of these. We want to make sure we measure it again and again and each one of these bottles has a totally unique composition. And so basically, we want to make a map. And I say that literally and figuratively. We want to make a map of what that chemistry could look like to a spacecraft instrument when we get there. And so that way, hopefully, as soon as we get that first blip of data back, we can say, ah, I know exactly what's going on there. And what I'm trying to do, what my group is trying to do is have less head-scratching and more return. We want to say, okay, based on that first data point, we're pretty sure this is what's going on. Now we know what to measure next instead of trying to wait for a lot of data to come back. And so a lot of this has been happening during the pandemic, so I happen to have a picture of me in my sparkly mask and sparkly sweater from last winter working in the lab. We have different kinds of experiments we do. So the ones that you're looking at here, this is all seawater, only seawater. So if we go back to this picture, it's just what's going on here. Let's make an assumption about, okay, let's assume something happened here. Now what's going on from here to here? So we also have experiments that are what goes on from the seafloor to the water and then to the gas. And so this is a picture of one of my former students, Brad Claggett. He's actually now an instructor in Oklahoma. So he's an instructor there which is really exciting. And he was doing a bunch of these different experiments. So they're in these containers that are sealed off from the atmosphere so they can't have Earth-like atmosphere in them. And one of the cool things he did, so this is a beaker, a close-up of a beaker here. And one of the things that he and I discovered is that just the water and the rock together with nothing else interesting going on, just them together would spontaneously start creating gases. We never anticipated that this would happen, so it was a really cool result when we got to see that. So it was really, really fascinating. And I wanted to point out that we have here these little pits that you see here. These are all where gases escaped from the interior. And you can probably see this is sort of like wavy, dark and light colors in here too. So actually there was a change in the chemistry of the rock that we had at the bottom and it created new gas in an environment where you shouldn't have had any gas forming. So really exciting results and hopefully we'll get to do more of those experiments. So that's the lab side. I'm going to take another pause just to see if there's any questions in the chat about this stuff. I don't see any yet. I'm sure people are amazed and thrilled so far. Hopefully. Well I'm trying to make sure we've got plenty of time, so I'm going to run through now some field stuff. So kind of on the lab side and really a lot of the experiments that I do in the lab they are places that are very, very difficult to find an analog on Earth. Some of the only analogs on Earth are really going to be in the Antarctic or Arctic and they're really difficult to think about. There are other places like I said early, early on one of the things that we have to think about is what's the science question that we're trying to answer. So maybe going to the Gulf of Mexico answers one good science question but it doesn't answer another one if that makes sense. So Antarctica might be a great place to go because you want to think about how the ice interacts with the water there. But it might not be a good place if you're thinking about how the rocks alter in that event. Maybe it's just too cold there for that alteration to happen on a timescale that's worth it. So that's why we do that in the lab because we can speed up reactions like this basically go through geologic time a little faster in this way. And we can also make sure that we have variables covered. So we can say I only want to do this and I can remove life in my experiments I can't do that on Earth. Alright, so let's move on to planetary analogs. So how do we do this on Earth? I know I've mentioned this a few times now. This is not work that I'm currently doing. But I just wanted to put this image into your mind how crazy these environments and how similar they can look. So one of the things, you know, it's easy to talk about volcanoes. And we're going to talk about volcanic systems here in a second. But, you know, we have this is just such a stark comparison. We have the Mississippi River Delta on the left and an ancient river system on Mars on the right. And it's always tricky to make these comparisons because they're not perfect. And we as scientists have to be incredibly careful about making these sorts of comparisons because they're not the same exact kinds of environments. So we have to be really, really critical of the way that we talk about them. So I wanted to bring this up as a very cool, exciting example side by side, but also a I guess a hesitation, a caveat to all of these kinds of things. So, again, like I'm saying, you have to be really careful about the question that you ask. Okay, so one of the things that I want to discuss with you guys because I have been in the field for now 20 years and I've been to so many different kinds of places, but this past summer, actually in September, I was able to go to my first lava tube and people at NASA Goddard and other places have been going to lava tubes for a long, long time. I was going for a very different kind of reason. So I first wanted to just describe what are lava tubes. They're also, you might hear me say this, they're also called lava caves. So the idea is that you have I love this, this is from a publication I just found earlier. So the idea is that you have this lava flow, it kind of cuts through this rock as it's flowing, and then when the lava slows down, the lava might move out of the way, but it leaves an empty space in there. So you end up with this open space and you can see, I like the examples they give because there's a very small one right here, and then a much bigger one here. When we were in Hawaii looking at the lava caves, you could actually see that there were different times that the lava had flowed through that cave, so there were different colors of lava in there, which is fascinating to see. Because I'm used to rocks from the ocean and not rocks from lava. It was really cool. Alright, so one of the reasons we got excited, and when I say we, I mean NASA, so one of the reasons NASA's really excited about lava tubes in general is because they could shield living things from radiation. So one of the most challenging things that we're coming up against if we're going to try to stay for a while on the moon or on Mars and try to habitat these people, these places, we need to find a way to shield ourselves from radiation because that's the danger, that's the biggest danger that we face there. Lava tubes is a great environment for that because what we've discovered through lots of different experiments in the lab, again, is that if you blast something with radiation, it only goes down about 10 centimeters. Maybe a little bit more. So if you were able to go underneath the ground, you could be very well shielded from this powerful radiation. So it would be a great place to live. And that's not just for astronauts. So that also means that life could be there. So if life emerged on these places, they could also be hiding out in some of these lava caves or lava tubes. So this is an image taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and it's actually showing you, this is called a skylight. And so this is actually where it's kind of collapsed in on the top and you can see into the lava cave underneath. So this is an example from Mars. And the cool thing is actually, so this is zoomed out and the reason it's got all these colors is because we're just telling you what the elevation is. So, right here, this is actually, it's on the right-hand flank of this volcano, so this ancient volcano. So it's a really cool environment to study. And so we were actually looking at analogs in Hawaii for this kind of environment. And this is just a picture of myself, so I'm right here, and this is my collaborator, this is Jennifer Stern, who's I think also given one of these talks before, and you can tell how big this particular part of the cave is, because we look tiny in here. And this is taken from the entrance, so actually from the skylight, looking down into the cave. So that's us from there. And you can see it has lots of different levels in here, and this is because that lava flows and churns and maybe a later lava flow flowed in a different path than the earlier ones. So just to give you a sense of where this is, just a more concrete example. So we were on the big island, and I've got my little heart in the middle there, is where we were. So this is Mauna Loa, and you may have heard in the news fairly recently that Mauna Loa started erupting again, actually very close to our site, which made all of us very, very nervous. So I'm going to zoom in here. So here's again the top of Mauna Loa, and that was right here. And we'll zoom in some more. So here's that top of Mauna Loa again. And right here is our site. And you can start to see all these really dark radiating patterns. And the radiating patterns are lava flows that go down different directions. And so the lava flowed down this way or down this way. And you can actually tell, even just from a satellite image, what direction the lava flows went from there. I'm going to keep zooming in so you can kind of see how this changes. So now we've zoomed in some more. I'm going to zoom in kind of like right in here. This section right here, this is actually, you can tell like sort of an ancient lava tube system. High Seas Analog Habitat is actually one of NASA's training areas. And so we actually went to the lava tube that is close to that. One of the reasons is because there's a nice service road that we could drive up, park, let's see, I think we parked about here, and then we would hike down to the lava tube that's there. And hopefully you can already see these little black dots in here. So those little black dots are the skylights. I'm going to keep zooming in. Okay, so now you can see a couple of different black dots in here. And so there's actually a few different skylights and a few different lava tubes. And so some of them are not accessible. Some of them are really wonderfully accessible. We can get to them. So that's kind of where we're looking at. And just to give you a sense of what this looks like, if you're standing on the ground, this is our hike to the entrance. We're just a little ways off of that service road, and we're walking on what's called Pahoehoe. So that's this kind of flowier looking lava. The lava, which is this really crumbly stuff. It makes sense the way that we remember it and feel this, ow, ow. This is really crumbly lava. So we want to walk on the Pahoehoe, which is much nicer to walk on. And we set up these cairns here. I think you can also see one way out in the distance here. And that gave us a way to find our way as we walk down because it kind of looks like the surface of Mars out there, which is in stark contrast to an hour drive down the mountain, which has tons and tons of plant life. So the reason that I was out there, and I'm going to show you a little video, but I don't think you'll be able to hear the sound on it. Just so you can kind of see some action shots of what we were trying to do. But this is actually a picture of me on the left-hand side, and I am laying in this very, very small space. And I wanted to show you inside that cave there are so many different kinds of little environments. So a couple things that I was doing while I was out there, one of which was test the air in the cave. And so that air could be trying to get gas samples in this little pocket way back in here, or it could be the general air in the cave. So it was very challenging for us to sit there and think about well, how do we not contaminate it? Because when we breathe and the gas that we're testing, it could be contaminated by us. So we did a lot of different tests. And the video I'm going to show you is sort of me. I had a long tube and I'm just lassoing it into parts of the cave to try to collect gas that was way far away from where I was breathing. We also actually blew into the tube so we would have direct samples of what it looks like when the gas looks like Bethany or like Jen, for that matter. And then we also tested the surfaces here to see if like, are there microbes just living on the surface and do they like different kinds of lava flows? Maybe they do, maybe they don't, which is really exciting. So I wanted to show you kind of a contrast of what those surfaces look like. So this is in pure dark, complete darkness, which was nerve-wracking and exciting. And this one you can actually see a little bit of light coming through and actually some sort of plants that are growing here. And just as another kind of like showing you the difference in environment. So this is a huge cave here, probably the ceilings are about, I'd say, 15 feet tall in here. And so I was sampling, you know, gas in this cave, but also in these teeny little pockets in here. And so what we can discover is there are different kinds of environments for light in these different places. So some kinds of organisms like that dark constricted areas. And some of them really like the open areas with nice flow. And then I'm going to just start playing this but really talk over it. Yeah, it doesn't look like I can even hear it from this. But this is Jen and myself in the cave, and we're taking various samples. So you can see, yeah, we've got our group in the background. So this is actually the skylight where we're coming in. And then that's me lassoing into the cave. So we're trying to collect these gas samples using this handy contraption that we set up. And then we put them into, I'm actually plunging all of that gas into a separate container. And we measured it with a lab that I set up in my hotel room. I actually set up a full chemical in my hotel room. It was just for gases, so it was fine. And then we're measuring the surface to see how productive those microbes are on the surface. And that's of course me getting really excited about the cave. All right. I am going to stop there. I know that was probably a lot to go over in a short amount of time. But I really wanted to give you guys a sense of what is it like to be out in the field? What is it like to be in the lab? Why do I do these things? And hopefully you guys have some questions. And then this summer we're going to totally different lava tubes. So I'm actually leading a field expedition to some lava tubes on the Canary Islands this summer. And this is just an aerial shot of some of the volcanoes, not the lava tubes themselves. But we're very excited.