Cross-Analog Comparison: Hawaii, Iceland, and Lanzarote Lava Tubes

A cross-analog comparison across Mauna Loa, Lofthellir, and La Corona shows where a single quilt engine holds up under basaltic variety — and where it needs local priors.

Hawaii, Iceland, and Lanzarote are not interchangeable analogs, even though every planetary mission architecture memo treats them as a loose set. The NASA BASALT program record describes a 4-year $4.2M PSTAR program at Mauna Ulu that picked Hawaii for a specific set of basaltic-volcanic reasons. The Wiley JGR Solid Earth paper on La Corona lava tube system, Lanzarote documents La Corona's 7.6 km length and up to 28 m width, which are different morphological targets than Hawaii's narrower thermal-erosion tubes. And the Astrobotic writeup on drone mapping the icy lava tube in Iceland describes Lofthellir as a water-ice-filled tube whose acoustic and thermal regime does not overlap Hawaii or Lanzarote.