Danger Dust

Sensors being installed this month along the rim of Erebus could help researchers understand the threat the wildly active volcano poses to McMurdo and New Zealand’s Scott Base next door. And a planned field campaign this month to Waesche will explore the possibility that climate change could reawaken ice-bound volcanoes, whose hot, eruptive bursts could in turn accelerate ice loss in a new, dangerous feedback. “It’s an interesting hazard,” says Matthew Zimmerer, a geochronologist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT).