Towering over Ross Island in the Antarctic, appearing deceptively close to Scott Base because of its sheer size, Mt Erebus is known to many only because of the tragic fate of Air New Zealand flight 901.
What many people do not know is that at 3794m, Erebus is an active volcano, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, and one of just a few worldwide with a lava lake simmering and intermittently erupting in its crater.
Counterintuitive to expectations of a frozen Antarctic are hot gases seeping out of the ground on the flanks of this giant, creating ice chimneys and caves and heating soils to 65degC.
And yet, it is teeming with bacterial life.
It was this life that brought a team of five scientists from the University of Waikato to set up camp at 3400m at Lower Erebus Hut, in search of bacteria from the thermal hotspot known as Tramway Ridge.
Principal investigator Dr Craig Cary says much of this extremophile bacterial life is unique because the thermal environment where it evolved has been untouched by other life for millions of years.
"Antarctica's been separated from South America for 30 million years," Dr Cary said, back at Scott Base.
Biologically speaking, the bacteria are very, very old.
"When you look at the genealogy - if you want to call it that - of these bacteria, the bacteria that are currently up there appear to be ancient relics of the current microbes that you see in the rest of the world."
Dr Cary's team hopes to compare this community with those in similar environments elsewhere in the world to see how they have evolved in isolation and how they survive in conditions similar to those thought to have been experienced by the first bacterial life on Earth.
To take samples of the bacteria-containing soil, the team donned sterile white biohazard suits to avoid introducing bacteria from their bodies into the systems. This also had the unintended effect of camouflaging the team against the snow-covered mountain.
"It kind of feels like you're in those combat mountain suits that the soldiers wear," Dr Cary explained with amusement.
"We haven't lost anyone up there but it does look funny, as on a cloudy day, somebody can walk away from you and disappear and all you can see is the bottom of their boots occasionally."
The man in charge of making sure the scientists didn't disappear and could survive the temperatures - averaging between -25degC and -30degC - was Antarctic field training instructor Jason Watson.
In addition to the cold, the team had to acclimatise to the altitude, which, because of the Antarctic's thin polar atmosphere, means 3400m at the Lower Erebus Hut felt more like 4300m, Mr Watson said.
"It was one of those funny jobs where it's probably one of the most spectacular sights I've seen down here," he said.
"But at the same time, it's one of the most demanding and mentally difficult jobs for me to do with that point of dealing with the altitude, environment and my own illness [from the altitude]."
After acclimatising for several days at the Fang glacier at 3300m, the team set about taking samples, limited by the difficulty of working at altitude and dealing with recalcitrant equipment such as the temperature-challenged skidoos they used to traverse the mountain.
"It's quite an interesting area," Mr Watson said. "There are fumaroles [and] near those are all these cave systems which have quite thin roofs, so you have to be really careful about where you skidoo and where you walk so you don't fall through."
The fumaroles of which Watson speaks are chimneys of ice that can grow to great heights, formed as water condenses and instantly freezes in place.
Besides working at Tramway Ridge, Mr Watson took the team into the fumaroles and ice caves, around the rim of the main crater and inside the calmer western crater, as part of the scientists' second aim of trying to find whether Tramway Ridge holds bacteria unique to Mt Erebus.
The Marsden-funded team explored one such fumarole by cutting into the exposed side of the chimney and lowering Dr Cary 20m into an abyss, the bottom of which revealed a maze of tunnels stretching in all directions, lit by an intense blue light filtered by 10m of overlying ice.
"It's easy for me to just set up a crevasse rescue system and just get the others to pull him in, and he just pops out like a cork," Mr Watson said, grinning.
Once they had obtained the soil samples, PhD student Chelsea Vickers began the difficult task of trying to grow the unique bacteria from the Tramway Ridge stock back in Scott Base, a process Dr Cary calls "a shot in the dark".
"We've got a lot of bacteria growing from Erebus right now. Most of them are probably not important - they're the weeds - but we're hoping there are a few guys in there that are unique."
Ms Vickers concocted seven types of what Dr Cary calls "boutique media" - agar-type substances in which to grow the bacteria - some purged of oxygen, some even containing the exoskeletons of insects.
"The more media you make and the more you vary it, the more potential there is to get some of those bacteria," Ms Vickers said. "We'll get back to New Zealand, put them under a microscope and from there, we get a morphology analysis so we can see if there are different types of bacteria floating around under the scope.
"Once I have them, I can extract their DNA and go and collect soil from New Zealand to see whether I would get the same thing or if it is unique to Tramway Ridge. If it's unique to Tramway Ridge, it would have some kind of adaptation that is really novel that allows it to survive in those conditions."
Some of the adaptations of these bacteria have the potential to be used in industry, but only if you can get them back from the Antarctic alive and growing in the laboratory.
"The last person who tried to isolate anything from Tramway Ridge was Hugh Morgan in '89 and the bacteria he isolated is now used in forensics. They used that bacteria and extracted an enzyme which is now used to accelerate the speed of DNA fingerprinting. So, there's some pretty cool stuff up there we could potentially exploit."
However interesting and possibly lucrative these spinoffs may be, Ms Vickers says the ancient bacteria at Tramway Ridge might represent some of the earliest forms of life, and being able to isolate them might also help us understand how life began on Earth.
"The theory on evolution of life is that life started in thermal conditions," she continued. "So they started in hot conditions with low nutrients and limited oxygen, which is very similar to what you find up on Erebus, and once we've got that, we can start to compare these to the bacteria that are around now and see how the adaptations have changed as the environment has changed."
And could they also point to how life might exist outside our planet?
"Yeah, sure," Dr Cary said with a laugh.
The Antarctic's Dry Valleys are already said to be the most similar environmental system on Earth to that of Mars - Nasa scientists are, in fact, studying them on this basis - but Dr Cary thinks Mt Erebus might also have a hydro or geothermal analogue system in Saturn's moon, Europa.
"It's always a big stretch to go from current to astrobiological, but I think the more we look at these extreme environments, the more likely we are to find cues or clues to how and where organisms might evolve in other planetary bodies."
