Anaglyph of Patagonia #3442

This view of northern Patagonia, at Los Menucos, Argentina shows remnants of relatively young volcanoes built upon an eroded plain of much older and contorted volcanic, granitic, and sedimentary rocks. The large, dark "butterfly" pattern is a single volcano that has been deeply eroded. Large holes on the volcano's flanks indicate that they may have collapsed soon after eruption, as fluid molten rock drained out from under its cooled and solidified outer shell. At the upper left, a more recent eruption occurred and produced a small volcanic cone and a long stream of lava, which flowed down a gully. At the top of the image, volcanic intrusions permeated the older rocks resulting in a chain of small dark volcanic peaks. At the top center of the image, two halves of a light ellipse pattern are offset from each other. This feature is an old igneous intrusion that has been split by a right-lateral fault. The apparent offset is about 6.6 kilometers (4 miles). Tonal and topographic discontinuities reveal the fault trace as it extends across the image to the lower left. However, young unbroken basalt flows show that the fault has not been active recently. This anaglyph was generated by first draping a Landsat Thematic Mapper image over a topographic map from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, then producing the two differing perspectives, one for each eye. When viewed through special glasses, the result is a vertically exaggerated view of the Earth's surface in its full three dimensions. Anaglyph glasses cover the left eye with a red filter and the right eye with a blue filter.

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/NIMA [0003-0701-0820-0832] by 0003