Research on Mt. Erebus | Continent 7: Antarctica

I love doing my job. I get to take people on all these fantastic adventures. It's a rough place; neither you're safe, and you come home, or you screw up, and you don't come home. We have to be a little bit more minimal with the stopping, or else we're gonna get in trouble.

Start digging, and our team is trying to basically do an MRI of Mount Erebus. It's a really unique volcano, and the fact that it erupts a sort of bizarre magma type of the fauna light, which is pretty rare but can erupt really violently. There's no doubt in my mind that we're on terrain that has crevasses underneath it we can't see.

I have to poke around and really have a good inspection of the site, kind of feeling in the snow for the consistency in the snow depth. There's always some risk of falling into crevasses. I've had very close friends die in crevasse falls in situations just like what we're dealing with here, so for me, it's something that's very real.

So my job is to decide if it's safe enough for the scientists to install all the fancy stuff out here. Every minute counts; we've got to be really efficient to get the job done. Our goal for this project is to make measurements at 132 different locations around Mount Erebus, creating a map of the insides of the volcano.

Hey guys, I think it looks good to get out. It's a nice accumulation zone, so there's lots of snow here, and it's a nice compression area as well. So I think as long as we keep it nice and tight, we should be fine.

It's gonna bump our sleep in the last 36 hours for me, but that's a good hole. This little box is the brains of the operation out here and is basically a really, really fancy data collector. We've got to really try and get all the work we need to done because what we're doing is gonna be applicable to the volcanoes and similar geologic settings all over the world.

We just hope that what we do is meaningful and beneficial for those that come next. There we go, working now; we're good.