[Rockhounds] Could melting ice wake up Antarctica’s volcanoes?

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Antarctica is a land of not only ice, but fire. More than 100 volcanoes
hide beneath the ice sheet or poke through it. One, 3800-meter-high Mount
Erebus, seethes menacingly just 40 kilometers from McMurdo Station,
Antarctica’s biggest research base. Another, Mount Waesche, has yielded
unsettling hints that ice loss triggered its ancient eruptions. Now,
researchers are targeting both peaks to learn about immediate and long-term
threats.

Sensors being installed this month along the rim of Erebus could help
researchers understand the threat the wildly active volcano poses to
McMurdo and New Zealand’s Scott Base next door. And a planned field
campaign this month to Waesche will explore the possibility that climate
change could reawaken ice-bound volcanoes, whose hot, eruptive bursts could
in turn accelerate ice loss in a new, dangerous feedback. “It’s an
interesting hazard,” says Matthew Zimmerer, a geochronologist at the New
Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT).

Erebus is only a 20-minute helicopter ride from McMurdo, so since the 1960s
scientists have studied the volcano and the lava lake that roils within its
caldera, occasionally tossing out “bombs” of molten rock. Seismometers
placed near the summit have revealed much about Erebus’s shallow magma
plumbing. But high winds have deafened the instruments to the rumblings
from deeper magma, says Rick Aster, a geophysicist at Colorado State
University. “We’re looking into the tip of a magmatic system that extends
perhaps 150 kilometers into the mantle.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/could-melting-ice-wake-antarctica-s-volcanoes