#mount michael

Mt. Michael, an active volcano in the South Sandwich Islands, rises more than 3,000 feet above the southern Atlantic Ocean.

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Rare lava lake discovered thanks to satellite imagery

These images, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, show Mount Michael, an active stratovolcano on the remote Saunders Island in the southern Atlantic Ocean. In the false-colour image, a distinct hotspot can be seen in orange in the crater of the volcano, while in the true-colour image volcanic ash can be seen over the snow and smoke plumes coming from its crater.

Given its remote location, its 1000 m height and challenging climb, scientists have found it difficult to observe Mount Michael on the ground, but luckily satellite imagery came to the rescue! The assessment of Mount Michael’s lava lake, conducted using satellite data, was recently published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research and it confirms that the rare lava lake is a continuous feature inside Mount Michael’s crater, with a temperature of approximately 1000 °C.