Going where no one has gone before

Wes LeMasurier '59 has his name on hundreds of square miles of waterfront property.

The only problem? The site's a little hard to get to, and Antarctica isn't really the best place to take a vacation.

That doesn't bother LeMasurier. When the U.S. Board of Geographical Names informed him in the early 1970s that a volcanic mountain on the Pacific coast of Antarctica would bear his name, LeMasurier was more than satisfied.

"It's not a giant mountain, but I'll take it," says LeMasurier, a professor of geology at the University of Colorado. "It looks real good from the water. But it isn't exactly going to be something like Pike's Peak, where thousands of people go every year. Perhaps one or two people every ten years will see it."

LeMasurier's mountain is in a remote area of Antarctica that he was one of the first to explore, back in 1968. It's among a group of volcanoes that forms the southern portion of what geologists refer to as the Pacific Rim of Fire-a circle of volcanoes stretching for thousands of miles around the Pacific Ocean.

According to LeMasurier, the Antarctic section of the rim has a different origin. Elsewhere, volcanoes arise when the edges of two plates come together one plate tucks under another and pushes up the higher plate.

In Antarctica, the volcanoes seem to be the result of a plate that is being stretched. No one knows why, but LeMasurier's best guess is that the phenomenon is caused by hot material rising from the earth's mantle. The material pushes up through the plate, causing it to crack and form volcanoes on the surface and underneath the ice and glaciers that cover the southernmost continent.

LeMasurier, who has been studying volcanoes since the 1960s, when he earned a Ph.D. in volcanology from Stanford University, says that his research "is the sort of thing where you have to gather samples at the surface in the area and imagine what's going on beneath the ice sheet and deep within the earth's interior. For example, samples composed of chips of basalt glass probably were erupted in contact with glacial ice, and these can help determine the history of the ice sheet."

He has gathered his materials on seven trips to Antarctica during the past twenty-five years. The trips, which have varied from two weeks to two and a half months, aren't your average journeys to Antarctica-if there is such a thing. After the six to eight-hour flight from New Zealand, LeMasurier has to board a U.S. Navy j transport plane for a 1,000-mile flight east to one of the most remote areas in the world. From there, he boards a snowmobile for further exploration.

How does it feel to be the first human being to explore a part of the earth? "It adds a great deal of excitement to the work," he says. "If you're the first one, you have very little idea what to expect, except that there will be a lot of surprises."

Since he has often been the first person to study these volcanoes, LeMasurier says he doesn't enter the region with any specific scientific objectives.

"The idea is to discover what's there first, then piece together the geologic history that's recorded in volcanic rocks," he says. He tries to collect plenty of samples, which will provide clues to how the volcanoes evolved, and takes a lot of pictures, because he knows he may never get back. It took him eighteen years to get back to one especially interesting volcano.

LeMasurier takes his samples and photos to his lab in Colorado to study them for several years. In addition to many articles in professional journals, he has written one book, Volcanoes Of the Antarctic Plate and Southern Ocean.

One trip always seems to bring on another, since "it's tough to get it all right the first time you're there." An eighth journey isn't outside the realm of possibilities, he says, but for now, "I still need to publish some of the data I found the last time."

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