South Pole Volcano Eruption - Mt. Erebus Blasting Massive Molten Lava Bombs

• Report rights infringement
• published: 09 Sep 2011
• views: 6726

Using VideoComm's wireless video system, researchers are able to monitor Mt. Erebus' eruptions from 20km away (safe and sound). Watch as this volcano sends molten lava within feet of our wireless equipment! VideoComm is proud to support these researchers with the most advanced wireless video transmission technologies necessary to capture Real-Time, wireless digital video of the most unseen geological wonder in the world. Mount Erebus, which towers 3,794 Meters above sea level is considered the world's southernmost historically active Volcano. Monitoring earthquakes, exploding magma (lava bombs the size of a Buick!) and an active lava lake deep inside a 22,500 square foot crater is no easy task. From a safe distance (22 Miles away), researchers from the New Mexico Technical Institute are able to study the volcanic activity in Real-Time using VideoComm Technologies RT-WAVE wireless digital video system. Dr. Bill McIntosh, Associate Professor of Geochemistry for the New Mexico Technical Institute writes: "The VideoComm Technologies wireless video system fired up instantly when I restored power, which we had switched off last January (2010) due to an anticipated shortage of winter solar power... The new VideoComm RT-Wave video system, which we are using to send video from the crater rim is truly working as advertised. We appreciate having the video from VideoComm Technologies RT-Wave system, still running flawlessly after several years in the field. Thank you for all of your support over the last decade" Antarctica ranks below all other regions in the world for number of dated eruptions. Despite its size, 75 percent of its eruptions are from this century. Precise dating of past eruptions is difficult since most of the landscape is glacier-covered, travel is daunting, and trees ( wood ) needed for radiocarbon dating does not grow in this extreme climate. Mount Erebus (3,794 meters), the world's southernmost historically active volcano, overlooks the McMurdo research station on Ross Island. Erebus is the largest of three major volcanoes forming the crudely triangular Ross Island. The summit has been modified by several generations of caldera formation. A caldera is formed when the largest and most explosive volcanic eruptions eject tens to hundreds of cubic kilometers of magma onto the Earth's surface. When such a large volume of magma is removed from beneath a volcano, the ground subsides or collapses into the emptied space, to form a huge depression. For Mount Erebus, a summit plateau at about 3,200 meters altitude marks the rim of the youngest caldera, within which the modern cone was constructed. An elliptical 500 x 600 meter wide, 110-meter-deep crater truncates the summit and contains an active lava lake within a 250-meter-wide, 100-meter-deep inner crater. The glacier-covered volcano was erupting when first sighted by Captain James Ross in 1841. Continuous lava-lake activity has been documented since 1972, punctuated by occasional strombolian explosions that eject lava bombs onto the crater rim. Larger-than-usual Strombolian explosions occurred in September to December 1984. Earthquakes were felt, with glow and increased steaming observed from the McMurdo Sound research station 37 kilometers southwest of the volcano (P. Kyle and others, in Smithsonian Institution, 1984). The summit crater lava lake was buried by ejecta between 13 September 1984 and October 1984. When the lake was exhumed in December 1985 it was 15 meters in diameter, and it grew to 20 meters in diameter by December 1986 (P. Kyle, written commun., 1987)