This bubbling lake of lava is the reason the G081 project exists - studying and monitoring the famous Antarctic volcano, Mt Erebus. Therefore this lake was the reason I had a job for the winter, and didn't have to spend Christmas at home in the freezing rain. Thank you Geology Gods.
This was my third visit to the mountain, a special place in so many ways. If any of you remember the details from the BBC series Frozen Planet then you may recognise this place. If you don't then here's a reminder.
This 75 metre wide lava lake sits at the bottom of the crater, 250metres below the rim, at around 1400 degrees C. The rim rarely rises above -20C in summer. That's a big temperature gradient over 250m. Now, we don't make a habit of visiting the lake, I've never been, and after catching an eruption on film this year I'm happy not to! (more of that later...)
This is the camp - LEH (Lower Erebus Hut) situated at around 3400 metres. It's a pretty luxurious installation considering it's location, although as it's left there all year anything less than heavy duty buidlings would just blow away. "Garage with Geeks" (orange on the left), "Eating and Leisure..." in the middle and storage on the right in a summer only rack tent. The black box between the last two is the house of the poostick and I will not go into any more details there.
This is a photo of Mount Erebus taken from the top of Mount Terror with the Transantarcic Mountains
in the background. The black ridge on the right flank of the mountain is Fang Ridge and Fang camp is in the little col between that and the next slope. The main camp (LEH) is on the slightly flatter area half way between the summit (3794m) and Fang Ridge. This was my home for 7 weeks. Poor me.
We fly down on a military C-17 from New Zealand, get on the monster truck (above) to "town" and spend a couple of days in meetings and on refreshers and such before heading out into the field. Last season I spent almost 3 weeks sorting food and gear in McMurdo before heading out with 16000lbs of cargo, this year I spent 3 days there and took around 100lbs of my own stuff. Two very different seasons.
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| Solomon the Beard mentally prepares himself for the flight to Fang |
Before arriving at LEH, it's necessary to spend two nights acclimatising at a place called "Fang Camp" - a 20 minute ear popping flight up to 3000m from sea level. In the alps this wouldn't be that high but because of the high latitude (well over 77 degrees South) the effective altitude is close to 3500m and the hut is more like 4000m. If you flew straight in you'd be asking for trouble - one person was evacuated with HACE (High Altitude Cerebral Edema) a week before I got to camp even after these precautions.
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| Flo looks confused as he thinks he can smell garlic in the cabin... |
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| Getting dropped at Fang Camp |
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| Fang Camp, at 3000m, with the volcano smiking away in the background. Nice ski gullies if there were ever any nice snow! |
And so, after two nights at Fang, including a very gentle walk up to LEH on the second afternoon for Thanksgiving dinner (climb high, sleep low with a severe turkey overdose thrown in...) we moved up to LEH for the rest of the season. It's important to take it really easy for the first few days, to save giving yourself any altitude problems. Put our tents up, unpacked, wandered around, cooked, ate and drank lots of fluids. The high altitude, cold air and heated hut all dehydrate you more than normal, not mentioning my tea drinking addiction...
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| My sleep tent - internal temperatures range from -30 C to +30 C depending on whether it's sunny! |
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| Tirzah, a carpenter, demonstrates the correct use of a drill to mix ice cream |
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| With 15 in the hut for meals and hanging around it's a fun and busy place |
So there were 15 of us for the first period of the season - and numbers ranged from this to two of us at the end. Science projects were varied - plume sampling, gas sampling, ground penetrating radar of caves, LIDAR (laser mapping) of the lava lake and some cave sytems, gravity survey, cave research (temperature profiles, mapping), using a RC quadcopter to fly around instruments. Lots of stuff and I pretty much get involved in most of it, although my two main responsibilities were the cave research support and the gravity survey. The latter involves driving all over the volcano and a little flying round in a helicopter taking gravity measurements (ie are we still on the ground) and the former involves abseiling into fumaroles (ice towers) and down into some of the cave systems on the mountain to deploy and remove logging equipment. Variety is the spice of life!
Anyway, time to shut up and show you some photos - this is a photography blog after all....
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| Alisdair (my black market tea supplier) jumars back up out of the entrance to Warren Cave |
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| Alisdair does his fame impression - you can just make out the ankle warmers... |
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| Team Carp enjoy a rest on the snow in the sunshine |
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| Ice crystals, which change daily, in Mammoth Cave |
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| Hannibal Lecter waits for the Helicopter to leave before cracking the drum of Chianti... |
This is Sune Tamm - the LEH camp manager this season. A Scandinavian British American mixing pot, he makes everything run smoothly, feeds us in the evening and riles us with tales of derring doo from his time at BAS (the British Antarctic Survey) in the good old days. He wintered at Halley the year after I last wintered with BAS so we had quite a few shared friends and experiences to talk about to annoy/bore the others. This is the first season there's been a camp manager at LEH and it makes life SO much easier. Keep up the good work America...
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| The famous Erebus fumaroles |
There are vents leaking hot gasses from the ground all over the volcano and these melt out the snow and ice around them and create some sort of cave. The warm humid air eventually finds an exit to the outside and as it reaches the freezing air much of the moisture condenses into rime ice creating a chimney - called a fumarole. These are our access points to the ice caves under the surface although sometimes, like this one below, the entrances were too dodgy to use. Luckily we found another entrance on the back of this that had much less apparent danger, so we went in to retrieve loggers placed two years ago and to take gas samples from the vent.
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Alisdair and I check out (and write off) the normal entrance - with
overhanging rime ice and lots of evidence of previous collapses |
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| Aaron hangs outside the new, safer entrance. The 20m tower hides a further 12m of abseil to the rock below |
This is one of the hottest vents on the mountain, the chimney leading to an old lava tube (a tunnel in rock) and is aptly named Sauna Cave as the upper tunnel is 40 degrees C. After abseiling into the chamber from an outside temperature of -30 C in your down gear you arrive somewhat inappropriately dressed - even stripping down to the bare essentials, working in a 40 degree vent at 100% humidity is pretty uncomfortable. This place wins the "craziest place on the mountain" award for me so far.
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| Sauna cave and suncream... |
Then there's the crater. It's about 1km across, 250 metres deep and the walk around it has in my humble opinion one of the most breathtaking views in the world. It takes between 1 1/2 and 4 hours to circumnavigate depending on how many photos you want to take and how cold it is! Sune and I used to take it as a regular post Sunday lunch jaunt just like being at home (but without the rain)
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| A panorama of the main crater - the main tripods for science gadgets are on the right... |
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| ...and here's some people standing at the tripods from another angle! |
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and this is looking out across the disintegrating sea ice 3700m below
with the Transantarctic Mountains in the background |
So all in all a pretty spectacular place - and one worthy of at least two blog posts. This is good as my eyes are going square (or widescreen actually) and I don't want you getting bored already...
Next time it will be caves and lava explosions, with a little taster above.
