The researchers often get stuck in their research camp-two 16- by 24-foot huts at 11,400 feet elevation-waiting for the weather to clear. Still, winds can whip at 100 miles per hour, and blizzards and whiteouts are common. They helicopter the 20 miles from McMurdo to Erebus at the beginning of the six-week field season, which lasts from mid-November to early January, when the temperature on the mountain can reach a balmy -5 degrees. Most of the year scientists monitor the volcano remotely, gathering data from seismometers, tilt meters, GPS signals, video cameras and microphones. Mount Erebus looms over the United States' main research base in Antarctica, McMurdo Station, on Ross Island. "The lava lake gives us a window into the guts of the volcano," says Philip Kyle, a volcanologist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. On Mount Erebus, the churning magma is exposed at the top of the volcano, in a roiling 1,700-degree Fahrenheit lake perhaps miles deep. Most volcanoes have a deep central chamber of molten rock, but it's typically capped by cooled, solid rock that makes the hot magma inaccessible. But the scientists are more interested in the volcano's crater, with its great pool of lava-one of the few of its kind. The scientists who work on Mount Erebus say that its ice caves are every bit as much fun to explore as you might expect. Steam escaping from the cave freezes as soon as it hits the air, building chimneys as high as 60 feet. Gas and heat seeping through the side of the volcano melt the snowpack above, carving out a cave. The flanks of Erebus are spiked with ice towers, hundreds of them, called fumaroles. Most of his photographs were taken during the soft twilight that passes for night during the polar summer. Thanks to his expedition to Erebus last year, funded by the National Science Foundation, he's one of the few photojournalists to document up close one of the world's least-seen geological marvels. You're almost as likely to find him in the Sahara as at his home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Steinmetz, 49, specializes in photographing remote or harsh places. And though he'd heard that reaching the 12,500-foot summit would be an ordeal, he wasn't prepared for the scorching lava bombs that Erebus hurled at him. The volcano constantly sputters hot gas and lava, sculpting surreal caves and towers that the photographer had read about and was eager to see. George Steinmetz was drawn to Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, by the ice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |