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Top comments on this AMA get a volcano named after them!

No seriously, it is not up to me to name these volcanoes at this point. There is a special committee whose role it is to give things names, such as remote volcanoes or mountains, in Antarctica. But people who study Antarctica for long enough are good candidates, and usually end up having something named after them (for example my coauthor Rob Bingham), so I could be in luck someday!

She sounds like she could be a blast, but maybe a bit of an ash hole sometimes.

Luckily I did not end up having too many problems with this- if anything I maybe doubted myself because of how young I was. I found it hard to believe at first that an undergrad like me could stumble across something this big without anyone else having discovered it! Luckily scientists are, in my experience, fairly open to others no matter their background. So long as the evidence you present is solid and your research interesting, they will give your their time of day and treat you without any bias. For getting the story published my lack of experience was maybe a little more of an issue sometimes, it can be quite delicate choosing which journal to send the paper to and how to format it. Luckily my coauthors have a wealth of experience on this so were able to help me through.

I'm hoping to do a collaboration with George R.R. Martin set in Antarctica called 'A song of Ice and Fire 2'. Complete with murder, intrigue and fire breathing penguins.

To be honest it was something of a coincidence to start with!

I started looking at the Antarctic data for another reason entirely- I was just trying to understand more about how the ice sheet flowed. However I started stumbling across cones under the ice, something that should not be there normally as ice erodes the land into long valleys and ridges. I grew up in a region surrounded by volcanic cones, so it immediately occurred to me that these may be volcanoes.

I didn't think it was necessarily a big deal at first, but by talking to different professors and reading up about the area it became evident that this could actually be an important discovery. And this started me down the path that lead to getting this published.