Name: Weird Places: The Lava Lake in Antarctica
Uploaded: 2021-05-19T07:25:24.000Z
Duration: 4 min 37 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

full of life and great for a relaxing vacation.

they're scorching, seething pools of molten rock.

They're also pretty rare, outside of MineCraft

permanent lava lakes only exist in a few places around the globe.

One of the strangest lava lakes is atop Mount Erebus,

Probably the weirdest thing about this lake is that it's constantly releasing gas,

and the composition of that gas changes on a roughly ten-minute cycle.

which is kinda fitting for a place made of ice and fire.

Mount Erebus is the tallest peak on Ross Island,

which lies close to the Antarctic mainland

It's an active volcano that's been bubbling away for decades,

occasionally throwing off larger eruptions.

and it sits in a crater which is itself inside Mount Erebus's main crater.

Under the lake is a conduit, a tube that leads down to a chamber full of magma

The lake is basically like a bowl with a hole in the bottom

sitting on top of a pipe - like a sink, I guess you could say

except it goes the other way: it doesn't go down, it goes up.

And all of it's about a thousand degrees Celsius.

Even in the frigid Antarctic air, the lake's surface won't cool into solid rock

thanks to convection currents that feed the lake

Hot magma rises to the top of the lake, then spreads outward,

so it sinks back down again – and the convection cycle continues.

Lava lakes need that crater, conduit, and magma chamber combo to exist,

and not many volcanoes have all those components so well aligned.

That's why molten lava lakes are super-rare

there are only about five on Earth that have remained persistently active

So the Mount Erebus lava lake is an unusual and remote place,

but thanks to some intrepid scientists, it's an area of active research.

Scientists have braved freezing slopes and burning lava bombs

that's the technical term for flying blobs of lava

and they've installed remote sensors to keep tabs on the lake 24/7.

One mystery they're working on is the lake's persistent gas emissions.

For years, Erebus has been steadily releasing a gas plume,

there's a repetitive shift in both the amount of gas produced,

For example, the carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide ratio changes,

as do emission levels of water vapor and sulfur dioxide.

Researchers have been trying to figure out why there's this repeating cycle,

and based on sensor data and computer modeling,

they think it has to do with two main sources of gas.

One comes from the conduit, and the other comes from diffusion in the lake.

The carbon dioxide-rich gas is always rising up from the conduit,

the amount and composition doesn't really change.

But the conduit also occasionally, like every ten minutes or so,

burps out a large blob of magma from deeper in the chamber,

like a kind of literal one-way lava lamp.

Once a blob gets near the surface of the lake it releases a fresh set of gases,

which adds to the total amount of gas detected

and changes the overall composition because it's rich in water vapor

the lava lake also has what researchers call explosive degassing.

These less frequent but more impressive belches cause small eruptions,

The two systems seem to work independently.

The composition of the gas from the explosive degassing is different

and appears to come from much deeper in the volcano's magma chamber.

There is still a lot left to learn about Erebus, and lava lakes in general.

For example, there are gas cycles with other cycle lengths

Working out if they're connected, and how,

will build up a better model of the inner workings of Mount Erebus.

Mount Erebus also contains a rare type of magma called phonolite.

It's much thicker than the more common basalt variety,

which probably affects the fluid dynamics inside the magma chamber and lake.

So hopefully the recent studies on Erebus will be useful

for scientists working on other lava lakes around the world.

These lakes may be rare, but having good models

from the few examples around the world will help geologists

understand the similarities and differences between them

and the overall rules about how they work.

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