Mount Erebus, at 3.794 m asl, is situated on Ross Island (Ross-øya) in the Ross-sea,
Antarctica. Its exact position is 77°32'S - 167°10'E.
Also called the world's 'coolest' volcano. It is currently the most active volcano with a boiling
lavalake,which is in the inner crater on Erebus at about 3.700 m asl. Lava was observed
coming fromthe crater for the first time during 2000-2001. The temperature in the lake ranges
between~900° - 1130°C.

Monday, November 8th, 2004

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory,using data provided courtesy of
NASA/GSFC/METI/ ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

As of the 3rd of November, the Earth Observatory reports the existence of an "ice-tongue"
from Mt. Erebus (refer to photo above). The Erebus glacier in Antarctica comes down
from Mt. Erebus and protrudes off the coast of Ross Island, forming an 11-12 km long ice
tongue—a long and narrow sheet of ice projecting out from the coastline. The Erebus Ice
Tongue is the serrated, blue-rimmed "knife" extending toward image center from the upper
right out into snow- and ice-covered McMurdo Sound. Beneath the smooth white expanse
is the Southern Ocean.

An ice tongue forms when a valley glacier moves very rapidly out into the sea or a lake.
When the sea ice in McMurdo sound thaws in the summer, the ice tongue floats on the water
without thawing. It also calves off in places forming icebergs. The Erebus Ice Tongue is only
about 10 meters high, so its icebergs are small. When the ice around the tongue melts in the
summer, waves of sea water constantly batter the edges of the tongue, carving very elaborate
structures in the ice, sometimes producing deep caves at the margins. (View icebergs from
Vatnajökul inIceland here).In the winter, the sea freezes once more around these new shapes

Foto courtesy of MEVO (SWVRC)

November 29th. 2001
About 23.November several strombolian eruptions (~1-10 each day) occured from the
15 m wide lavalake. Smaller explosions came from a smaller vent on the shore of the lake.

12.april 2000

Foto courtesy of MEVO (SWVRC)

Mt. Erebus, discovered in 1841 by James Ross, it is one of only a very few volcanoes in the
world with a long-lived (decades or more) lava lake. Scientific research, sponsored by the
U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) since began the early 1970’s had included basic study
of the petrology and geophysics of the volcano, the eruptive history, activity and degassing
behavior of the lava lake, and the overall impact of the volcano on the Antarctica and global
environment. Research on Mt. Erebus has been primarily conducted by scientists in the
Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the Bureau of Geology and Mineral
resources at the New Mexico Institute of Technology.