MONTE BURNEY BY ROBERT OLIVER CUNNINGHAM

ROBERT OLIVER CUNNINGHAM (1841-1918)
Monte Burney (1,758m - 5,768 ft)
Chile

In Monte Burney, engraving, 1871

The volcano
Monte Burney (1,758m - 5,768 ft) is a volcano in southern Chile, part of its Austral Volcanic Zone which consists of six volcanoes with activity during the Quaternary.  This volcanism is linked to the subduction of the Antarctic Plate beneath the South America Plate and the Scotia Plate. The volcano is named after James Burney, a companion of James Cook.  It is one of the many English language placenames in the region, which are the product of the numerous English research expeditions such as these by Robert FitzRoy and Phillip Parker King in 1825-1830.Monte Burney is formed by a caldera with a glaciated stratovolcano on its rim. This stratovolcano in turn has a smaller caldera. An eruption is reported for 1910, with less certain eruptions in 1970 and 1920.  Tephra analysis has yielded evidence for many eruptions during the Pleistocene and Holocene, including two large explosive eruptions during the early and mid-Holocene. These eruptions deposited significant tephra layers over Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

The naturalist
Robert Oliver Cunningham  was a Scottish naturalist. In January 1866 he was appointed Professor of Natural History in the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, but resigned in June in consequence of being appointed by the Admiralty to collect plants as naturalist on board HMS Nassau, ] then commissioned for the survey of the Straits of Magellan and the west coast of Patagonia.  This voyage started on 24 August 1866 from the Thames, and on 18 February 1967 she arrived in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands to coal, departing again on 2 March, much to Cunningham's regret. They returned to the Falklands in 1868 enabling Cunningham to explore and study the plants and seaweeds on East Falkland returning a third time early in 1869.  The Nassau returned to England on 31 July 1869 but Cunningham remained employed by the Navy so that he could write up his natural history notes and his narrative of the voyage, this was published in 1871 as The Natural History of the Straits of Magellan.  In all, Cunningham published 18 scientific papers before 1872 his first which was about gannets was his theses but the others were mainly on his observations from voyage of the Nassau.  He presented some of these papers to the Zoological Society of London and to the Linnean Society, becoming a fellow of the latter in 1870.

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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
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