And the legacy of the Mt Erebus disaster is still felt 40 years on. Air New Zealand had started operating scenic flights over Antarctica only two years before, and they had been a great success.

While some, like Mount Erebus, visibly remind us of Antarctica’s volcanic nature, the majority lie buried under kilometers of ice, making them difficult to study and even harder to predict.

This story appears in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. The scene: a tent on Mount Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island, Antarctica. The tent is a four-cornered tepee ...

George Steinmetz was drawn to Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, by the ice. The volcano constantly sputters hot gas and lava, sculpting surreal caves and towers that the photographer had read about and ...