![]() Although its name ultimately harkens to Greek mythology’s personification of darkness, Captain James Ross named the volcano after one of his ships, the HMS Erebus, in 1841. Mount Erebus overlooks McMurdo Station, and nearby sits the hut built by legendary polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his men before they summited Erebus in 1908. The snow-covered Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth and shares Antarctica’s Ross Island with three other volcanoes, all dormant. Credit: Robert Falcon Scott/ Wikimedia, Public Domain Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday.Įrebus has long been familiar to polar explorers-this photo was taken by Robert Falcon Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. “This is the first great image of one,” said geophysicist Phil Wannamaker at the University of Utah, who participated in the work. “If we can also get an idea of where the magmatic system is, you can better understand the monitoring data when these systems enter periods of unrest,” said lead scientist and geophysicist Graham Hill at the Institute of Geophysics at the Czech Academy of Sciences. This dryness allows magma to travel much closer to the surface than water (H 2O)-rich volcanoes that stall out at about 5 kilometers below the surface.ĬO 2-rich volcanic systems are less well understood than the more common H 2O-rich arc volcanoes. Instead, it’s rich in carbon dioxide (CO 2). Unlike arc volcanoes such as the Cascades in western North America, Erebus has very little water in its magma. Now, research has revealed the plumbing underneath Mount Erebus that keeps the lake full.ĭata taken by measuring natural electromagnetic waves traveling through Earth revealed the volcano’s magmatic system brings lava much closer to the surface than subduction arc volcanoes. The lake occasionally blasts out lava bombs from the summit crater of Mount Erebus, 3,794 meters high. One of Antarctica’s only active volcanoes is home to one of the few long-lasting lava lakes on Earth. Simply said, Mount Erebus provides an ideal proxy for the study of volcanoes relatively simple mechanisms drive rare, accessible and spectaculars geological features. Tephra stratigraphy is consistent with Ross' observations and further suggests that the volcano's geological history is marked by explosive eruption events and is further reflected in the concentric caldera patterns. Upon the discovery of the Erebus volcano by Ross and his crew in 1847, reports describe an explosive eruption. The lithology points to a three stage building process: the shield building stage where the mantle plume would have been protruding the crust, a cone building stage where evolved lavas would have formed the flanks of the volcano and finally a marked increased lava forming stage forming the bulk of mount Erebus. Seismic velocity surveys suggest a thick layer (~5 km) of solidified phonolitic lava flows overlying cenozoic sediments and a basaltic basement. The surface geology of the volcano is almost entirely phonolitic anorthoclase. The age of the plume correlates both temporally and spatially with the Terror rift (see side note). Ross island itself is on the extensional rifting margin of the West Antarctic Plate, the north eastern terminus of Terror ridge. ![]() To the south, geological similarities suggests that brown peninsula would also have been a the product of the hypothesized Erebus hotspot. They all are though to be the product of crust thinning overlying a strong thermal anomaly and are consistent with a hotspot/mantle plume model. The volcano and its neighbouring mountains, mount Bird to the north and mount Terror to the east, all reside on Ross Island. Cameras, microphones, seismic equipment as well as scientists from a wide range of fields all monitor mount Erebus. It has thus been subject of extensive research. ![]() Furthermore, irony has it, it is relatively easy to access. It is notable for its persistent convecting lava lakes with Strombolian eruptions projecting bombs up to 10 m in diameter in the last decades and its size -at 3794 m above sea level and ~200km km^3 in volume, it is among the largest volcanoes of the world . Mount Erebus is an alkaline stratovolcano just off the shore of the Antarctic main land (77 33'S, 167 10'E).
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