Katherine Kornei reports that a labyrinth of icy caves runs for several kilometers through the glaciers near the 4,400-meter-high summit of Mount Rainier in Washington State. Explorers recently returned from an expedition to map and study these fumarole caves, named after the volcanic vents that release the searing gases that excavate the tunnels. The caves’ icy environs are an excellent analogs, members of the exploration team said, for moons in the far reaches of the solar system that might be good places to search for life and locations for habitation by humans.
This past summer, a dozen researchers with the Mt. Rainier Fumarole Cave Project spent 6 days exploring the caves. They investigated a lake within the labyrinth that they found hovers continuously near, and occasionally below, freezing. They also collected soil samples for microbial analysis and measured chemical properties of the caves’ ice. As they had done in the past, project members also used the caves as testing grounds for technology that might one day find use in space missions to other worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa.
The caves present both a fascination and a danger for the explorers. The constant release of hot plumes of volcanic gases from within the mountain continuously changes the shapes and pathways of the caves, said mountaineer Eddy Cartaya, the project’s coordinator and cofounder and a law enforcement officer with the U.S. Forest Service at Deschutes National Forest in Oregon. Unlike relatively permanent rock caves, “there’s no single surface within the [fumarole] caves that’s stable,” he reported last month at the 129th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America held in Seattle, Wash.
Entrances to Mount Rainier’s fumarole caves can be clearly seen at the summit, and escaping steam often beckons curious climbers. However, despite its exotic beauty, the labyrinth poses a host of perils, project scientists warned. “You don’t dare go down there without a gas monitor and multiple sources of light,” said Cartaya. In addition to the very real danger of getting lost, pools of carbon dioxide gas persist in some lower passages of the caves. “A couple of breaths and you’d pass out,” cautioned Florea.
Despite the relative isolation of the caves—fewer than 5,000 people summited Mount Rainier in 2015—humans have left a noticeable mark on the terrain. Anything dropped on the mountain is slowly absorbed into the glaciers and carried down as new snow is deposited and the underlying ice melts from the bottom up, explained Florea. In 10 or 15 years, it rains out of the ceiling of the caves. “What you see now is hundreds of tent stakes, canteens, and busted stoves,” Cartaya added. “It’s literally raining garbage inside the caves.”
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