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Mount Michael is an active, sputtering volcano that is largely covered in glacial ice. Its slopes are dangerous, and it has never been summited, which means no one has ever peered into its crater. It’s also so far from civilization that “it’s almost like it’s on another planet,” said Rosaly Lopes, an expert in planetary and terrestrial volcanology at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved with the study.

Image A false color satellite image taken in Jan. 2018 of Saunders Island and the lava lake within the crater of Mount Michael. Credit... British Antarctic Survey

That meant that finding it required satellite observations and analyses. Starting in the 1990s and early 2000s, some orbital eyes spotted prolonged thermal anomalies that hinted at a lava lake’s existence, but couldn’t prove it. But improved satellite imagery from the Landsat, Sentinel-2 and the Terra missions and better processing techniques have allowed this lake to be conclusively identified in a report published this month in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research. Its thermal signature could be seen throughout the observation period, suggesting the lake is probably persistent.

The area is often cloudy, and a seemingly constant volcanic plume conceals the lake most of the time. Fortunately, the team collected enough shots of the lake from 2003 to 2018 that clearly showed a crater floor containing a superheated lake 295 to 705 feet across. The lava is also 1,812 to 2,334 degrees Fahrenheit, with the higher end of that range about as hot as lava on Earth seems to get.

This discovery emphasizes the geographic diversity of persistent lava lakes. Others have been found within Ethiopia’s Erta Ale, Antarctica’s Mount Erebus, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Nyiragongo, Nicaragua’s Masaya, Vanuatu’s Mount Yasur and Ambrym and Hawaii’s Kīlauea.