By TOM GERROW
BG Independent News
Hidden far below the icy depths of the Antarctic seafloor is a region where magma – extremely hot, molten rock – is always seeking weaknesses in our planet’s crust through which it can erupt, forming volcanoes.
BGSU geology professor Dr. Kurt Panter, along with BGSU graduate students Katie Shanks and Jacci Kalemba, joined an international team of scientists and the crew of the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer for a journey to the Ross Sea in West Antarctica from February 11 to April 16, 2025. Their mission: to study volcanic activity on the Antarctic seafloor.
Panter and Shanks discussed their research voyage during a BGSU Science Café presentation at the Wood County District Public Library on Wednesday, March 25.
“A lot of people don’t think about volcanoes in Antarctica because they think it’s just a frozen continent,” Panter said. “There’s nothing, no heat going on at all. But it’s actually very volcanically active.”
“My research over the last 35 years has been trying to understand why there are volcanoes in Antarctica and what their origin is,” Panter said. “And I study where magmas are produced in the deep earth and what happens to them as those magmas rise to the surface.”
While it may feel a bit counterintuitive to think about volcanic activity on a continent largely known for its glaciers and ice shelves, Panter explained that the West Antarctic Rift System is an area where the Earth’s crust, or lithosphere, has stretched and thinned, allowing hotter material from the Earth’s mantle to get closer to the surface.
The area has many volcanoes both above and below the polar ice. During their presentation, Panter and Shanks highlighted several active Antarctic volcanoes, including Erebus, the southernmost active volcano on Earth, and Mount Early, which is the southernmost volcano that’s exposed.
Their expedition focused on the Terror Rift Volcanic Field in the Ross Sea.
“This had only been looked at a couple times before in any detail,” Panter said. “So we were there to really try to nail down what’s going on there.”
For graduate student Shanks, her particular interest was an area in the Terror Rift called Davey Bank.
“It’s the only seamount down there that was previously named, but nothing is known about it,” Shanks said. “There have been some studies going on there, but mostly in relation to the glaciation, not so much on the volcanics. So I wanted to dive into Davey Bank because it’s been untouched.”
“Our main mission, at least for Katie and I and the other student, Jacci, was to actually get rocks from the sea floor,” Panter said. The team would go over areas of interest and map the sea floor using sonar, then go over specific areas at slower speeds to map them more precisely so they could plan where specifically they wanted to dredge. Using GPS to get the ship in position, they would lower the cable with the dredge to the ocean bottom, some 500 meters below.
“Instead of just taking the ship and dragging the dredge, we’d actually have the captain move the ship forward, laying the cable out on the ocean floor at a certain rate across the feature that we want to dredge,” Panter said.
The captain would then hold the ship steady in place while the team used a winch system to pull the dredge.
“That winch system allowed us to keep track of the tension on the cable,” Panter said. “And that’s a safety factor, partly. If you put too much tension on the cable, if it snaps, it could come off and not only damage the ship but take out a few people.”
Once the dredge had been retrieved, the real fun began – sifting through a big, smelly pile of mud.
“But within that mud were little gems,” Panter said.
They would repeat this process over and over on an often-grueling schedule, working 12-hour shifts, and eventually performing 49 dredges on about 35 different volcanoes during their voyage.
Once the rock samples were gathered and cleaned, the team did some preliminary shipboard research before boxing the samples for shipment back to the United States. This research yielded some interesting discoveries.
“Most of the material indicated that there were explosive eruptions on the seafloor,” Panter said. “We have evidence for that based on what the rocks look like.”
The team found lots of “volcanic bombs”, and also very fine-grained or fragmented material indicative of higher explosivity. These rocks, known as xenoliths, originated in the Earth’s mantle.
Dating the age of the rocks collected revealed a northward migration of volcanic activity in the area surveyed. Another curiosity: flat-top seamounts, and how they might have formed. One possible explanation, according to Panter, was that erosion from advancing and retreating ice sheets could have flattened the volcanic peaks into “pancake-like” structures.
But eventually, naval authorities notified the ship captain that it was time for the expedition to end due to worsening ice conditions.
“We had to ice break through several hundred miles of ice to get out of Antarctica,” Panter said. “If we would have stayed much longer, we would have been frozen in. And there were several times we had to ram and back up, ram and back up.”
“Sometimes the ice would pinch the ship,” Shanks added. “There are sheets of ice, but they’re still individual sheets. And sometimes, depending on the flow of the water, they’ll pinch the ship. So you can’t stay stationary for too long, otherwise you’ll get frozen in.”
One quirk when shipping materials from Antarctica back to the United States is that the 2,300 pounds of rock samples collected had to remain in the exclusive custody of U.S. entities and representatives. While the team hand carried some samples with them on their return journey to the United States, the rest of the rock samples were eventually delivered to BGSU in August, 2025.
Thanks to the work of Panter and his team, scientists at BGSU – and from around the world – will be able to access and study these samples to further our understanding of the geology underlying undersea volcanoes.