Ubehebe Craters

About Ubehebe Craters

The Ubehebe Craters (pronounced you-bee-HEE-bee) consist of an isolated group of overlapping maars formed during eruptions of alkali basalt along a fault cutting alluvial fan deposits on the flanks of Tin Mountain in Death Valley National Park. Ubehebe Crater is a 0.8-km-wide, 235-m-deep maar surrounded by a tuff ring. Little Hebe Crater, the second youngest vent located immediately south, is a small tuff cone with a 100-m-wide crater overlain by pyroclastic-surge deposits. At least a dozen craters are located within an area of 3 km2, and bedded pyroclastic-surge deposits cover an area of 15 km2. Early scoria cone formation was followed by hydrovolcanic explosions that formed two clusters of explosion craters and tuff rings. Field work and revised dating (Calzia et al., 2016; Fierstein et al., 2016) based on paleomagnetic and 10Be evidence has shown that the craters were formed during a single short-lived phreatic, phreatomagmatic, and magmatic eruptive episode about 2,100 years ago.