Mount Erebus
Interesting facts
- Erebus breathes out roughly 80 grams of gold vapour a day, which condenses into microscopic gold grains found up to 1,000 km from the volcano.
- It is the only volcano on Earth currently erupting phonolite, an unusual alkali-rich lava.
- Its summit cone is partly built of 'Erebus crystals', unusually large anorthoclase feldspar crystals, and one slope is named Crystal Slope after them.
- Volcanic gas escaping through the ice builds towers and caves on the summit, some reaching 25°C inside and home to microbes that live off chemical reactions with rock.
- Ross named Erebus and its neighbour Mount Terror after his two ships, which were later lost on John Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition.
- Members of Ernest Shackleton's expedition first reached the crater rim in March 1908, and the climb opened Aurora Australis, the first book printed in Antarctica.
- In 1979 Air New Zealand Flight 901, a sightseeing flight, flew into the mountain in flat-light conditions that hid the slope, killing all 257 people aboard.
- In the early 1990s an eight-legged tethered robot called Dante climbed part of the way down into the crater to sample lava-lake gases before its cable failed.
- The volcano has been active for about 1.3 million years, and its summit caldera was blasted out by a huge eruption around 18,000 years ago.
- British mountaineer Roger Mear made the first solo ascent, which was also the first winter ascent, on 7 June 1985.
Why it is worth it
Mount Erebus holds a double distinction: it's both the southernmost active volcano on Earth and the site of one of the rarest geological features anywhere, a lava lake that has stayed molten and observable since at least 1972. Persistent lava lakes require an unusually precise balance between the heat rising from a magma chamber and the rate at which that heat escapes into the air — get the balance wrong in either direction and the lake either freezes solid or drains away. Only a handful of places on the planet maintain that balance for decades at a stretch, and Erebus is one of them.
The scale of the temperature contrast at the summit is difficult to overstate. The lava lake itself sits at roughly 1,000°C, while the air immediately above it, at 3,794 metres on a volcano permanently wrapped in Antarctic ice, can sit around -40°C — a gap of well over a thousand degrees separating the crater floor from the crater rim, a discontinuity with almost no equivalent elsewhere on the surface of the planet. The volcano was first recorded erupting the moment it was discovered, sighted by Captain James Ross's expedition in 1841, and it was named after Ross's own ship, HMS Erebus. It has erupted at least thirteen more times since, with a period of continuous activity that, remarkably, is still ongoing.
Being this remote gives Erebus a strange kind of protection: unlike almost every other active volcano near a population center, nobody lives close enough to be endangered by it, which has let scientists study a live, continuously erupting lava lake for decades without the pressure of an evacuation clock running in the background.
Getting there
3470 km from Invercargill. Invercargill Airport (IVC) is about 3468 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth, located on Ross Island in the Ross Dependency in Antarctica. With a summit elevation of 3,792 metres (12,441 ft), it is the second most prominent mountain in Antarctica and the second-highest volcano in Antarctica. It is the highest point on Ross Island, which is also home to three inactive volcanoes: Mount Terror, Mount Bird, and Mount Terra Nova. It makes Ross Island the sixth-highest island on Earth by highest point.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
-77.53333, 167.28333per Wikidata