Volcanoes

The science lecture this morning was by my colleague Kurt Panter, a volcanologist from Bowling Green State University. He gave us a review of the volcanic history of the McMurdo area going back more than 20 million years. We expect to see volcanic sediments from numerous eruptions in the cores. These volcanic beds are important because they give us an absolute age for the rock layers based on radiometric dating. Mount Erebus is a 3900 m/12000 ft high active volcano on Ross Island and during our Snowcraft course we had a good view of it. As always it was slowly puffing away. The station is based on volcanic rock such as these basalt fragments with vesicles (imprints of gas bubbles) here in the photograph.

The other news is that we are now converting to nighshift and we expect to see core at midnight tonight, so I will have a loooong day ahead of me.