Christmas at the lava lake

Earth Observation satellites allow us to monitor places that are extremely difficult to access. The lava lake on Mount Michael, Saunders Island, South Sandwich Islands is one of these places. The existence of a lava lake at the summit (one of only 9 known lava lakes on Earth) was suspected for a long time, and finally confirmed by satellite imagery in 2019. Sentinel-2 and Copernicus Browser now enable anyone to view and monitor Saunders Island online. This scene is available publicly at the following link: http://link.dataspace.copernicus.eu/vfbe
The peak was first ascended and the lava lake observed in person by Emma Nicholson (University College London) in 2022, two years after this image was taken.
This scene is a Sentinel-2 image from Christmas Eve, 24 December 2019. The Southern Hemisphere summer offers a rare cloud-free view. Sentinel-2 data was processed with a variant of a well-known fire detection custom script (https://custom-scripts.sentinel-hub.com/custom-scripts/sentinel-2/markuse_fire/) This uses the short-wave infrared bands of the OLCI sensor to detect heat sources, and applies a classical a Short-Wave Infrared false color composite (https://custom-scripts.sentinel-hub.com/custom-scripts/sentinel-2/swir-rgb/) to those pixels while rendering the rest in tonemapped natural color (https://custom-scripts.sentinel-hub.com/custom-scripts/sentinel-2/tonemapped_natural_color/) AI assisted in the process of combining these scripts to create a new visualization algorithm that was applied uniformly to all pixels of the image.

The resulting product shows the hot lava lake in pink and enhances the small differences in shade over the snow surface. The heart shape of the lake is a coincidence, but I think it reminds us that through all the layers of rock, ice and clouds, the Earth loves us back.