12/1/2023 0 Comments Ice towers of mount erebusThe increased activity has necessitated the creation of a code of conduct to protect the scientific values represented by the caves. His work is the first methodical survey of the ice caves on Erebus, though the unique subterranean system is also drawing interest from biologists who want to study the unique microbial communities that live in these extreme environments. Scientist Werner Giggenbach conducts research around the Mount Erebus crater in the 1970s. “There are certainly a lot of caves that no one has been in,” Curtis said. A geographical database - still a work in progress - contains about 120 caves that have been visited, maybe half of all that exist on Mount Erebus. Fumarolic ice towers reaching up to 10 meters high cover many of the ice cave entrances.įor the last three years, Curtis has spent much of his time on the 3,794-meter-high volcano near McMurdo Station mapping the ice caves and towers. The ice caves are networks of passages melted into the base of the snowpack, where geothermal heat and warm gases vent through fumaroles. “It’s important for monitoring the volcano,” Curtis said. The coupled nature of the heat and gas spewing out of the discrete vents is important for not only understanding how the volcano works, but also improving safety to prevent accidents like the one that occurred on Mammoth Mountain. “These results enable the use of temperature as a proxy for flank degassing rate on Erebus, and represent the first application of DTS for monitoring an active volcano,” wrote Curtis and co-author Phil Kyle, principal investigator on the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory program. The temperatures dropped as the barometric pressure rose, and as the pressure dropped, the temperature rose, suggesting barometric pumping of the gas vents. In 2006, for example, on the ski resort Mammoth Mountain, three ski patrol members died after they were overcome by toxic fumes after falling through the snow into an ice cave.Ĭurtis made use of the first-ever temperature measurements on an active volcano using a distributed temperature sensing (DTS) instrument, which records temperature along a fiber optic cable. “Understanding how gas comes out of the flanks of volcanoes is something that volcanologists, in general, are really interested in lately,” Curtis said. Scientist Aaron Curtis sets up an instrument to monitor the atmosphere in Hut Cave on Mount Erebus. The research also suggested a link between changes in barometric pressure and temperature – and, consequently, gases like CO2. Ĭurtis was the lead author on a paper published last year in Geophysical Research Letters that used temperature data in the ice caves as a proxy for how much gas was being emitted from the fumaroles, or fissures, that feed into the caves and towers that dot the upper flanks of Mount Erebus. “I think there’s far more gas coming out of the edifice of Erebus as opposed to coming out of the lava lake than we think,” said Aaron Curtis, a PhD student at New Mexico Tech. Recent research into these steam-carved structures has found they are an important source of carbon dioxide gas emissions from the volcano. It turns out there are scores of peepholes into the volcano’s inner workings through the ice caves and towers that form where fissures on the flanks of Mount Erebus vent gas and steam. The discovery of a lava lake on Mount Erebus 40 years ago offered a window into the “plumbing” of Antarctica’s southernmost active volcano.
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