Ever wondered if there actually is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Well, we discovered it. It’s Mount Erebus, an Antarctic volcano at the very bottom of the world.
Hint: it spews gold. According to NASA, Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on the planet, a minimum of that we know about. It has a molten lava lake at its core. The stratovolcano increases 12,447 feet above water level, and it “regularly produces plumes of gas and steam, and sometimes spits out rock (bombs) in strombolian eruptions.”
Seems like a captivating location. In reality, the late 1970s, there was a terrible accident at Mount Erebus. An aircraft carrying travelers doing a flyover crashed into the side of it, and everybody onboard passed away.
There’s more to this volcano than its cruelty, though. For example, there’s that feature of how it produces gold particles into the air. Researchers have actually known about this because the early 1990s. (We were today years of ages when we found out about it, though.)
A research paper from 1991 says “crystalline particle [gold] has been discovered in the plume near the crater, in ambient air approximately 1000 km from the volcano and in near surface samples.”
According to IFL Science, the volcano gushes out somewhere around 80 grams of gold every day, which would deserve about $6,000– that is, if you could find out how to collect particles no larger than 20 micrometers large in one of the harshest places on Earth.
Anyone fancy a journey to the South Pole?
Ever wondered if there actually is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? We discovered it. It’s an Antarctic volcano that spews gold particles.