Like every other continent, Antarctica has hosted volcanic activity. Mount Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano, erupts continuously but nonthreateningly. Several volcanoes protruding from the West Antarctic ice sheet have produced bigger eruptions, the most recent of which was 7500 years ago. In 1993 a team led by Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas at Austin inferred from geophysical data 1 that there is an active volcano beneath the WAIS, but they found no direct evidence of any specific eruption. Now Hugh Corr and David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey have found evidence of another subglacial volcano, also under the WAIS, and of its most recent eruption some 2300 years ago—probably the biggest eruption in Antarctica in the past 10 000 years. 2
If you think of Antarctica as shaped like an open fan, West Antarctica is the handle. Separated by the Transantarctic Mountains from the much larger...
