Mountain · Antarctica
Mount Erebus
Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth, an icy giant on Ross Island in Antarctica with a lake of molten rock inside. It has been burning quietly for decades.
Picture credit: owamux (CC BY 2.0) · jeaneeem (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Mount Erebus?
Mount Erebus is part of the Ross Island, Antarctica.
You will find it in: Antarctica.
Summit: 77.530° S, 167.153° E
The story behind it
James Clark Ross sailed into the ice on 27 January 1841, saw a mountain smoking above the pack ice and named it after his ship, HMS Erebus; the second ship, HMS Terror, gave its name to the volcano next door. Inside the summit crater lies a lake of molten rock that has stayed open since at least the early 1970s, one of very few permanent lava lakes anywhere in the world. Gas bubbles burst through it in short blasts and throw lumps of glowing rock onto the crater rim. Erebus is the only volcano erupting phonolite lava today, and its ash carries pale crystals called anorthoclase that visitors pick straight out of the snow. Warm steam freezes on the flanks into hollow ice towers, and researchers study the microbes living inside them as a model for life on other planets. A first party reached the summit in March 1908, led by Edgeworth David during Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod expedition. Sources give the summit as 3792, 3794 or 3 795 metres, because ice and fresh lava keep reshaping the highest point.
Find it on the globe
Mount Erebus is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How high is Mount Erebus?
About 3 795 metres, roughly the height of the highest Alpine summits, and it rises straight out of sea ice. Different surveys give 3792 to 3 795 metres, and it is the second most prominent mountain in Antarctica.
Where is Mount Erebus?
On Ross Island in Antarctica, beside the Ross Sea, further south than any other active volcano. The McMurdo research station stands on the same island.
Does Mount Erebus really have a lava lake?
Yes. In the inner crater at the summit, molten rock lies open to the sky and has done so since at least the early 1970s. Only a handful of volcanoes on the planet keep a lake like that, and this one does it surrounded by ice.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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