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The Inyo craters are the two largest of four phreatic craters that lie within a 2.5‐km‐long, 500‐ to 700‐m‐wide N‐S trend of faults and fissures at the south end of the Inyo volcanic chain in eastern California. The alignment of these features with dike‐fed silicic volcanic centers of the same age a few kilometers to the north suggests that they were produced during intrusion of a dike at about 650–550 yr B.P. E‐W extension south of south Inyo crater is ten to several tens of meters, suggesting that the dike is at least that thick. To understand how the faults and fissures developed, we mapped and studied the fault and fissure pattern; used a theoretical boundary element model to determine the surface strain profile above a shallow dike in a purely elastic medium; and conducted physical model experiments of fault and fissure growth. Results of the field studies and experiments indicate that deformation develops according …