Monte Takahe

Mount Takahe is an isolated shield volcano in eastern Marie Byrd Land with an 8-km-wide summit caldera. The massive 780 km3 volcano displays a conical, youthful morphology, and the oldest dated rocks are only 310,000 years old. Three samples were too young to date by Potassium-Argon, and some tephra layers younger than 30,000 years in the Byrd Station ice core are thought to have originated from Takahe. Two early Holocene phreatomagmatic tephra layers in the Antarctic ice core were attributed to Takahe (Palais et al., 1988). The latest stage of activity constructed cinder cones on the upper southern flanks and tuff cones and cinder cones on the lower SW and NE flanks.