Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve protects the deepest-known split in the Earth—Idaho’s Great Rift—where the continental crust is thinning and breaking apart and allowing lava to spill onto the surface. The National Park Service (NPS) site contains over 1,000 square miles of flood basalts and other volcanic features such as lava tubes, spatter cones, and tree molds—the impressions left over in rock after hot lava incinerates forests.
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White Sands National Monument is in the northern Chihuahuan Desert in the U.S. state of New Mexico. It's the worlds largest white gypsum sand dunes. Between 1969 and 1977 93 African Oryx, a species of antelope from East Africa, were imported from the Kalahari Desert and set free. Today, over 300 of these animals run free.
White Sands was also one of the key locations of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. The testing of the first atomic bomb took place in 1945, 65 miles north of White Sands National Monument.
Today white sands is occasionally closed as the nearby White Sands Missile Range launches tests into the dunes.
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The Very Large Array is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomy observatory.
Cosmic radio waves are billions of a billion times fainter than radio waves used to broadcast information on Earth. Radio telescopes must be placed where they can collect these faint cosmic radio waves without any radio interference from humans or nature.
The Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico, northwest of Socorro, is a flat stretch of desert far from major cities. The Plains are ringed by mountains, which act like a natural fortress of rock that keeps out much of the radio interference from cities even hundreds of miles away.
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