Studying Microbes On Mt. Erebus, Antarctica

Earth Sciences Ph.D. student, Caleb Rosen, traveled to Mt. Erebus, Antarctica in Nov ’23 and Nov ’24 with an international research team based at the Thermophile Research Unit at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Mt. Erebus is the southern most active volcano on the planet and has geothermal fumarole near the summit that are kept warm and ice-free.

There, Rosen and his team collected gas and rock samples and are currently incubating growth substrates in the soil to discover how the local bacteria survive in this extreme environment. Ultimately, they hope to discover how microbes survive in the hot rocks on the flanks of this volcano, a relative oasis compared to the majority of the Antarctic continent.

Every year, the New Zealand post publishes a limited edition series of stamps for their Ross Dependency collection, the region of Antarctica south of New Zealand. In 2025, they featured Caleb’s project, the Multidisciplinary Analysis of Geothermal Microbes in Antarctica (MAGMA) studying microbes on Mt. Erebus.

Caleb standing next to geothermal fumarole near the summit of Mt. Erebus, Antartica

There, Rosen and his team collected gas and rock samples and are currently incubating growth substrates in the soil to discover how the local bacteria survive in this extreme environment. Ultimately, they hope to discover how microbes survive in the hot rocks on the flanks of this volcano, a relative oasis compared to the majority of the Antarctic continent.

Astrobiology