Erebus, from the Wegener InstituteĮrebus has been in continuous eruption since 1972. ![]() Some of the rocks erupted from Erebus contain huge chucks of deep-mantle minerals such as olivene, shown beautifully in this specimen in the Wegener Institute in Hamburg, Germany. That probably won’t mean a thing to non-mineralogy nerds but to crystal buffs a phonolitic lava lake is extremely rare. Phonolitic lavas are silica-undersaturated rare lavas high in feldspathoid minerals. Geography and Geologic Background Ross Island topographic map, Erebus at left.Įrebus easily takes claim to the title of the most active volcano in Antarctica, as the mountain’s summit hosts a perennial cauldron of phonolitic lava. This was one of the worst disasters in the history of New Zealand, paralleled only in loss of life by the Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 1931. Thanks to the MEVO, there’s even a live webcam inside the crater looking down at the lava lake:Įrebus claimed the lives of 257 passengers on Air New Zealand flight 901 on November 28th, 1979 when the pilots unknowingly steered their aircraft directly into the mountain at an elevation of only 1,500 feet above the ocean. This past weekend they were surveying the inside of a cave on the volcano’s flanks with LIDAR and collecting lava samples up on the rim at the summit. “MEVO” as it is called even has it’s own Facebook page, and scientists post daily updates during their field season. Why am I even attempting this?” You get further out and you get more and more committed.Įrebus is the site of the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory, which is administered by the University of New Mexico. I remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is absolutely ridiculous. I caught the shuttle to Scott Base, went out to the snowmobiles, threw the backpack in, fired it up and went down the peninsula. Before, during the work week, I had driven out and filled up the snowmobile gas tank, and got another five-gallon jerry can and put that on. ![]() It was a long and complex chain of events….I took off on Saturday night, about 9 o’clock, while everybody was getting drunk. I appropriated a snowmobile, got it a large chunk of the way up Erebus, and then hoofed it the rest of the way.
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