Winds howl. Snow swirls. Steam rises. You’re in Antarctica. You’re


standing on top of a volcano that’s covered in ice. Its name is Mt. Erebus. It’s an odd volcano. It never blows its top. Hot lava never runs down its sides. Yet steam rises from its crater. Look into the crater. Inside you see


a lake of lava. T e hot, melted rock burps and bubbles. T e sulfur in the lava stinks. It smells like rotten eggs. Sometimes, globs of lava fly into the air. T ey land with a sizzle. T e heat melts the ice and snow.


Fire and Ice Mt. Erebus changes all of the land around it. Its steam carves out ice caves. If you crawl inside of one, you’ll see ice crystals. T ey cover the cave walls. Sunlight lights up the ice. It fills the cave with a blue glow. Outside, icy chimneys


rise around you. T ey’re vents that go deep into Earth. Hot gases and steam rise up through them. T e steam hits the cold air, and it freezes into icy towers.


18 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER


What Lies Beneath Mt. Erebus may be icy, but in some ways, it’s like other volcanoes. Like them, its heat starts in Earth’s core. T e heat rises to the next layer. T is is Earth’s rocky mantle. T e core’s heat melts some of the mantle’s rocks. T e rocks turn into magma. T e magma rises. It pushes against


Earth’s crust. Giant sections of land, called plates, make up the crust. Magma flows through cracks between the plates. When the magma reaches the surface, it becomes lava. Lava spurts into the air. It falls to


the ground and hardens. Over time, layers of lava build a volcano. Most volcanoes form between


Earth’s plates. Mt. Erebus doesn’t. Here, the pressure from the magma is too great. It pushes through the crust.


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