This is in part because up on Erebus most life-forms are microscopic. The biology of the place has been less well documented. Since 1972 a team of volcanologists, long led by Philip Kyle, a professor of geochemistry at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, has spent part of each austral summer on the mountain investigating matters such as the nature and frequency of its eruptions, the types of gases it gives off, and the age of its rocks. And then there was me: in Jehle’s words, “a girl.”ĭespite its remote location and savage climate-the temperature averages minus 4☏ in the summer and minus 58☏ in winter-Erebus is a much studied volcano. Stu Arnold and Al Moore, two wind-burned New Zealanders with broad shoulders and broader accents, had the job of keeping us from, in Arnold’s words, “getting carnaged by the mountain.” Then there were Carsten Peter, the photographer, and his assistant, Daniel Jehle, both from the mountains of southern Germany. Cary also has an appointment at the University of Delaware, and before he began working in Antarctica, he traveled regularly to the bottom of the sea to study organisms that live on deep-sea vents. There were the aforementioned Herbold and the two senior members of his research team: Craig Cary, a flamboyant American, and Ian McDonald, an understated Englishman, both biologists at the University of Waikato, both veterans of Antarctic research. Our journey was less arduous: We went by helicopter. It took them five and a half days to get to the top, an undertaking that included a blizzard that kept them in their sleeping bags for more than 24 hours with nothing to drink, exposed them to temperatures of minus 30☏, caused one man to collapse with exhaustion, and gave another such an extreme case of frostbite that he ultimately lost a big toe. Terror, gave its name to a smaller, extinct volcano that stands next to Erebus.) But no one reached the summit until 1908, when the mountain was climbed by members of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition-the expedition on which Shackleton led a team to within a hundred nautical miles of the South Pole but turned back so as to get everyone home alive. Erebus, which had in turn been named after the Greek god of primeval darkness. It was discovered in 1841 during an expedition led by Sir James Clark Ross, who named it after one of his ships, the H.M.S. If Erebus were a dessert, it would be a reverse baked Alaska-frozen on the outside, hot in the middle. Its slopes are covered with snow and ice, glaciers, crevasses, and the occasional lava flow, but steam usually rises from its summit, betraying the heat within. It began to form about 1.3 million years ago and now stands 12,448 feet above sea level. Mount Erebus is the most southerly active volcano on the planet. He’s come to one of the coldest places on Earth to look for beings that thrive in heat. He’s a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Waikato in New Zealand and the junior member of a team of three who have come here to look for life in the volcano’s hot soils. “It’s got to be those funky archaea,” says my companion, Craig Herbold, a large, thirty-something American with a taste for Japanese electronic music and an interest in astrobiology, the study of what life elsewhere in the universe might be like. ![]() “What are your favorite microbes?” I say, dusting ice off my sleeping bag. Thus the inmates-of whom I am one-are passing the time by talking. It is too cold to read even with gloves on, it is too cold to hold a book. Between the sleeping bags are a large box, a Primus stove, a couple of thermoses, and two pairs of heavy boots. This particular tent is occupied by two people both are in sleeping bags. It is high enough at the center for someone five feet five inches tall to stand erect and has two vents at the peak that serve as chimneys. The tent is a four-cornered tepee modeled after those that Captain Robert Falcon Scott brought with him on his Antarctic expeditions more than a century ago. The scene: a tent on Mount Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island, Antarctica. This story appears in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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