Ross Island sits at the edge of the world like a frozen sentinel, and on its spine, Mount Erebus burns. 12,448 feet up, in temperatures that would freeze your breath before it left your lungs, there’s a lake of molten rock that hasn’t solidified in decades. It’s one of only five permanent lava lakes on Earth, and it’s in Antarctica. Because apparently, the planet has a sense of irony.
When Fire Decided to Live Where Nothing Else Could Possibly Survive
Erebus isn’t some dormant giant waiting to wake up—it’s been awake since 1972, when scientists first documented its persistent lava lake. The volcano erupts constantly, just not in the Hollywood disaster-movie way most people imagine. Instead, it belches gas and occasionally hurls molten bombs of rock hundreds of feet into the air, a process volcanologists call “Strombolian eruptions” after Stromboli, Italy’s chronically hyperactive volcano. These bombs can reach temperatures of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. They land on ice that hasn’t melted in millenia.
Here’s the thing: Erebus is weird even by volcano standards.
Most volcanoes spew basalt, the dark, iron-rich lava you see oozing across Hawaii. Erebus produces phonolite, a rare lava rich in sodium and potassium that crystallizes into feldspathoid minerals. Translation? Its chemistry is so unusual that it creates crystals found almost nowhere else on Earth—including anorthoclase feldspar, which forms in the extreme conditions of the lava lake itself. Philip Kyle, a volcanologist who’s studied Erebus since the 1970s, once described it as a “natural laboratory” for understanding how volatiles behave in magma. Turns out you can learn a lot about planetary processes when your laboratory is a bubbling cauldron at negative 40 degrees.
The Mountain That Swallowed a Plane and Never Let Go
On November 28, 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901 slammed into the lower slopes of Mount Erebus at 257 knots. All 257 people aboard died instantly. The wreckage scattered across the ice, some of it still visible today—twisted metal frozen in place like a monument to navigation error and whiteout conditions. It remains New Zealands deadliest disaster, and Erebus doesn’t care. The volcano kept erupting, kept glowing, kept being itself while recovery crews worked in conditions so extreme that frostbite was a constant threat.
Wait—maybe that’s what makes Erebus so unsettling.
It doesn’t pause for human tragedy. It doesn’t acknowledge our presence at all. Scientists visit it constantly, setting up monitoring equipment and studying its gas emissions, and the volcano just continues its slow, patient work of turning rock into gas and occasionally spitting crystals onto the ice. The lava lake rises and falls, sometimes by dozens of feet in a single day, driven by pressure changes in the magma chamber 1,600 feet below. In December 1984, an eruption threw bombs that landed nearly a third of a mile from the crater rim. Researchers found them later, still warm, sitting on ice that should have melted but didn’t, because Antarctic cold is stubborn.
Why Scientists Keep Climbing Into a Frozen Crater That Could Kill Them
Studying Erebus means camping on its flanks in temperatures that bottom out at minus 40, where fuel gels and electronics fail and your coffee freezes before you finish drinking it. Teams from New Mexico Tech have been monitoring the volcano since 1980, deploying seismometers and gas sensors and infrared cameras. They’ve documented patterns in its eruptions, tracked magma movement, measured the composition of gases escaping from fumaroles around the crater.
And they keep finding surprises. In 2011, researchers discovered that Erebus releases about 80 kilograms of gold dust into the atmosphere every year, vaporized from trace elements in its magma and then condensed into particles so fine they drift on the wind. You won’t get rich mining Erebus—the particles are microscopic and scattered across hundreds of miles—but it’s a reminder that volcanoes are elemental recycling plants, pulling material from deep in the crust and flinging it back into the world.
The Lava Lake That Glows in Permanent Twilight Like Some Kind of Geological Nightlight
During the Antarctic summer, when the sun circles the horizon without setting, Erebus glows against a backdrop of endless daylight. During winter, it’s a beacon in absolute darkness, visible from Ross Island’s research stations as a faint red pulse. The lava lake measures roughly 130 feet across, though its size fluctuates. Sometimes it’s placid, a surface of molten rock crusted over with cooling plates. Other times it roils, convection currents dragging cooler material down and bringing fresh magma up, and then—boom—a gas bubble bursts and a bomb flies out.
Turns out permanence is rarer than you’d think in volcanology. Most lava lakes drain or solidify or explode themselves out of existence within months or years. Erebus has persisted for over five decades, fed by a magma system that shows no signs of shutting down. It’s not growing, not really building itself higher the way stratovolcanoes usually do. It’s just maintaining, endlessly recycling the same material, a geological engine running on repeat at the bottom of the world.
What Happens When the Planet’s Most Remote Volcano Decides to Actually Erupt
Nobody knows what Erebus would do in a major eruption because it hasn’t had one in recorded history. The last significant explosive event was probably thousands of years ago, back when the only witnesses were penguins. Today, the volcano sits 25 miles from McMurdo Station, the largest research base in Antarctica, home to over a thousand people during summer. If Erebus decided to go full Vesuvius, the ashfall alone would shut down air operations. Volcanic bombs could reach inhabited areas. Lahars—volcanic mudflows—could form if the eruption melted enough ice, though in Antarctica, even that’s uncertain.
But Erebus doesn’t seem interested in drama. It just keeps doing what it’s done for decades: burning quietly, glowing in the dark, reminding us that fire and ice aren’t opposites—they’re neighbors, and sometimes they share a mountain.
