Discovery News - For many people, the word “Antarctica” evokes images of endless sheets of ice. But it turns out that the southern continent has a wealth of varied and spectacular features to offer.
Case in point: The Mt. Erebus ice caves. This winter on the Science Friday blog, Kayla Iacovino, a Ph.D. student in volcanology and petrology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, posted some jaw-dropping pictures of the caves.
In a post a few months earlier, she explained how the caves formed.
“The hot volcanic gas steaming from Erebus volcano, Antarctica does more than fuel the lava lake in its summit crater,” Iacovino wrote. “Hot gasses traveling up through cracks and fractures in the volcanic rocks surrounding the Erebus summit has created an intricate system of ice caves all over the mountain.”
