March 23 () –
Scientists have scaled the top of an active volcano in a remote subantarctic island for study and have confirmed the existence of a lava lake within its crater.
Mount Michael is a volcano shrouded in mystery. Only a handful of people have ever landed in the remote saunders island on which it sits, and before the expedition led by Dr. Emma Nicholson of University College London, no one had climbed the summit. The few glimpses from space that have slipped through the nearly constant cloud cover have tempted volcanologists.
“It has been known for several decades that Mount Michael it harbors a persistent thermal anomaly at its summit. A much hotter hotspot than the surrounding area,” Nicholson said. it’s a statement.
“We know from other volcanoes of ‘open vent’ around the world that host these hotspots that often have active lava lakes within the craters of their summits.”
Stable lava lakes are a rare geological feature. They need a careful balance between the heat supplied by gas and magma deep within the Earth and the heat loss at the surface to stay molten. Of around 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth, only seven have currently or recently hosted one, and Nicholson and his team they wanted to confirm suspicions that Mount Michael harbored the eighth.
Mount Michael’s remote location and continuous gas emission also make it an ideal natural laboratory for studying how the volcano’s emissions affect the local environment. The island’s closest inhabited neighbors are the Falkland Islands, 2,000 kilometers away.
“Very few other places have such a pristine environment where you know that every trace of metal you take in the environment is coming from the volcano,” Nicholson said.
The team, whose adventure has been illustrated by National Geographic, he hoped to use some of the virgin snow on the island for drinking water. However, when they tested some of the nearby snowpack, they found it to be deeply acidic and completely undrinkable.a clue to how much the volcano was affecting the island’s environment.
“I was hoping there would be some interaction, but I never expected it to be this strong, so it suddenly became a major research focus,” said Dr. Nicholson.
Saunders Island is part of the South Sandwich Islands, a volcanic archipelago that extends over about 350 kilometers of the Southern Ocean. These types of island arcs are found all over the world and form where two of Earth’s tectonic plates collide and one is forced under the other.
“It’s really a window into the development of more mature arcs,” Nicholson said. “The whole island arc itself is incredibly interesting because geologically it is one of the youngest volcanic arcs on Earth.”
Island arcs like these are home to millions of people around the world. In addition to shedding new light on how volcanic arcs develop over geological time, the team hopes that the lessons learned here contribute to improving eruption forecasts and volcano monitoring capabilities in populated areas.
