I was knocked over by the blast and was knocked unconscious.
There was a walnut-sized piece of my brain missing.
That could explain my personality.
Mount Erebus in Antarctica is one of the most unusual volcanoes in the world.
Dr Philip Kyle has spent 44 years trying to unlock its mysteries.
I was just smitten by it.
I said I had to see the top and understand how his volcano works.
Erebus Volcano is the southern-most active volcano in the world.
It is in the Ross Sea of Antarctica.
3,800 metres high, it’s one of the larger volcanoes in the world.
The wonderful thing about Erebus
is we have this lava lake.
Erebus breathes, the lava lake going up and down.
When it comes up, there's a little puff of gas and it goes back down.
Erebus is a living volcano because it breathes.
And so by looking at the Lava lake, we're actually looking inside the volcano.
It's like having a window in your chest so you could see your heart.
The characteristic feature of Erebus is this persistent gas plume which comes from the mantle,
which comes from 100 kilometres down.
Gas is the driving force for volcanoes.
Gases make volcanoes erupt.
So the gas leaks out from gas vents all around the volcano.
But Erebus, being in Antarctica,
gets hellishly cold in the winter,
down to minus 60 degrees or so.
And the gas that leaks out around the side hits the air and freezes, making these fumarolic ice towers.
When you just go there for the first time, you don't realise that virtually
under every ice tower is a big ice cave system.
There's literally hundreds of ice caves.
Gas vents that are leaking up from inside the volcano
come up, melt the snow, melt the ice and then form
these big chambers and tunnels that wind around.
There are these beautiful ice crystals that grow on the walls, exquisite looking
and they're sort of like fairyland.
The interesting aspect is inside the caves there is microbiological activity.
And so because it's warm, there's a lot of interest to understand the different
microbes that are down there.
Erebus is such an extreme environment
That this could provide insight into possibility of life on a place like Mars.
Right from the very beginning
one of the prime objectives for work on Erebus
was to try and get a sample of the gas.
Erebus the volcano itself, compositionally, is very different from any other
volcano in the world.
Sampling any high temperature gas in any volcano means you've got to be right down there,
right in the bowels of the volcano.
So it was always our dream and desire to get down into the inner crater.
That started this quest.
Doing that at Erebus was almost frightening in many ways, but we decided to give it a try.
We were just a bunch of silly scientists
But we didn’t have the experience of winches and climbing in there.
Erebus has these little small eruptions.
Molten magma just rises rapidly up,
it's been driven by gas and then explodes.
And on Erebus, these sorts of eruptions throw out these big lava bombs.
Big fat blobs of molten rock that go up two or three hundred metres in the air, sometimes higher,
and then just drop back down.
In 1974, we climbed down the main crater walls.
I happened to be in the crater with one other person
when one of these eruptions occurred.
These rocks were just dropping out of the sky around us and they go, 'Thump!'
And then you hear this hissing sound as the snows starting to melt.
I was knocked over by the blast and was knocked unconscious.
And as I was coming to, these rocks were all falling down around me.
When we left the crater, somewhat shell shocked,
two of us just flopped down on the crater rim
looking down at the camp where everybody was, just thinking we're lucky to be alive.
A couple of years ago, I had an MRI on my head and the doctors came up with a
surprising find that there was a walnut-sized piece of my brain missing and they said
well I must have been concussed and I must have had some head injury.
So the assumption is that that eruption just wiped out a bit of my brain.
So that could explain my personality.
Phil and his colleagues tried again to get into the crater four years later.
But Erebus erupted again.
There was an eruption from the active vent exactly the same as the one that I had experienced earlier.
Bombs were flying through the air, it scared us off and that was really the last
attempt at sending a person into the crater to get gas.
Modern technology now allows scientists to study the gas from the crater rim.
Erebus has really become a big part of my life, been my heart and soul.
I have spent 44 birthdays in Antarctica, mostly on Erebus.
The steaming volcano behind me as my birthday cake.
This is a world of great contrasts
and especially when you think about temperature.
Here you have this permanent, persistent lava lake.
It’s 1,000 degrees Celsius.
But when you're up on the crater rim, you're always looking for ways to warm yourself.
One way is to find areas of warm ground
and there are some places where there's warm ground that it's over 60 degrees Celsius
at about a foot depth.
These are great places to cook turkeys.
So we have actually cooked turkeys and had Christmas dinner by burying turkey
and leave them there for two days, and they cook.
2016 was the last time.
It’s time to move on and let young people do it.
There's lots of new technology.
I'm old school, so it's time for the young studs
to come along and do something new and interesting.
In Greek mythology
Erebus is the gateway to Hades or Hell.
So if you want to go to Erebus, you get to pass through Erebus on your way to Hell.
So I've spent a lot of time standing up on the crater rim of Erebus
watching all these souls descending to Hell.
So get out, live it up and go to Hell
and you'll see Erebus.