In the fourth report from the 2011 Planetary Lake Lander (PLL) Expedition, the skies above Chile’s Laguna Negra go dark and thunder rolls in the distance. Dramatic weather brings biological sampling efforts at the Andean lake to a temporary halt. Instead, the PLL team spends their time working with samples that have already been collected.

When the weather clears, members of the PLL team strike out to yet-unexplored areas of Laguna Negra. When visiting the northwest shore for the first time, they discover a world that is much different than the environment they’ve been studying at the south end of the lake.

The Planetary Lake Lander (PLL) team has traveled to remote Laguna Negra in the central Andes of Chile to test technologies that could one day be used to explore the lakes of Titan. The project is led by Principal Investigator Nathalie Cabrol of the NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute, and is funded by the NASA Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program.