Geologists have confirmed the existence of a lava lake in the crater of an island volcano on an Antarctic island.
Satellite observations have shown that on the remote, snow-covered island of Saunders in the extreme South Atlantic, a stable lake of liquid lava remains in the crater of the active volcano Mount Michel. British geologists write about this in an article published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.
Despite regular appearances in feature films and documentaries, lava lakes are very rare. Of more than one and a half thousand volcanoes on Earth, only eight have them: on Nyiragongo in the Congo, Ertal in Ethiopia, Erebus in Antarctica, Hawaiian Yasur, at Ambrim on the Vanuatu Islands, Masai in Nicaragua, plus a lake discovered on Saunders Island. According to scientists, the temperature of its lava lake reaches 1280 ° C, and its dimensions are from 90 to 215 meters.
Composite image of a lava lake on top of the snow-capped volcano Mount Michel / © Landsat 8, BAS
For the first time, signs of the existence of a lava lake were noticed on satellite images back in the 1990s, manifested by temperature anomalies. However, it was not possible to confirm these observations: the area of the South Sandwich Islands is inaccessible and remote from areas of interest even to Earth sounding satellites. The nearest land, the Falklands, is more than 1,500 kilometers away. The slopes of the crater are covered with a thick layer of ice and snow, and smoke constantly swirls over the top. Only by combining the images obtained by the Landsat, Sentinel-2 and ASTER probes, the scientists were able to obtain data with the required resolution.