To divide
Fears of an explosion at the Phlegrean Fields supervolcano near Naples are growing: the earth is shaking several times an hour.
Pozzuoli – The Phlegrean Fields supervolcano, on the western outskirts of the metropolis of Naples, in Italy, appears to be increasing its activity. In 24 hours, the Earth shook about 50 times from Thursday (September 21) to Friday.
A total of 2,435 earthquakes have already been recorded in the “Campi Flegrei” this year; in 2017 there were only 120 concussions. Most of the time, seismographs record small, almost imperceptible tremors, but there are also shocks that scare people awake from sleep with a loud noise. Sometimes plaster falls off the wall.
Active supervolcano: the streets of Naples smell like rotten eggs
The smell of rotten eggs spreads across the suburbs of Naples – it’s volcanic sulfur vapor rising from cracks in the earth. But the epicenter of the relatively harmless earthquake is under and around the smoking Solfatara crater, near the port city of Pozzuoli, west of Naples, which is known as a tourist destination.
Experts agree that water and gases heated and rising by magma create pressure on the Earth’s fragile crust above the underground lava dome. That’s where the tremors come from. But what does it mean?
A map shows the earthquakes that have occurred this year, mainly in and around Pozzuoli. The red ones are the youngest. ©INGV
Danger for Italy and the whole world: expert sees a huge volcanic explosion imminent
Volcanologist Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo, principal investigator at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), caused quite a stir with an interview with local radio station Radio Radicale: “The authorities attach great importance to seismic risk, but in the Campi Flegrei there has never been such high seismicity. , while the real problem is that the current tremors may already be the harbingers of the eruption, which could be a super-eruption.”
A cloud of steam in the Solfatara crater, which constantly shakes. © Campi Flegrei red zone source/Facebook
It would be a catastrophe that would have dramatic consequences far beyond the Gulf of Pozzuoli. The energy released is then “ten times greater than that of Pompeii in 79 AD”. Mastrolorenzo is referring to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the southern outskirts of what is now Naples. The Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae, about twelve kilometers away, were destroyed and completely buried under a layer of ash up to 20 meters high. The total number of deaths is estimated at up to 5,000.
A volcano near Naples has already destroyed thousands of lives
Today, 350 thousand people live in Pozzuoli Bay alone and three million people live in the Naples metropolitan area. Mastrolorenzo considers evacuation plans in the event of an eruption completely inadequate: the assumption underlying the plans, that an eruption can be predicted 72 hours in advance, is “a very optimistic hypothesis, almost as if we had signed a contract with the volcano. “Even a single parameter can render any prediction unusable.
The 2018 Sinabung eruption in Indonesia would still be small compared to a supereruption. © TIBTA PANGIN AFP
Mastrolorenzo continued: “The problem is that the assessment of alert levels, that is, when to move to the orange level and in this case to the red level, is taken over by the Serious Risks Commission.” receive a false alarm or, even worse, delay the evacuation and potentially find ourselves in the middle of the outbreak.”
Previous Phlegrean Fields outbreaks became a global catastrophe
A look at Earth’s history shows what a super-eruption would mean: The Phlegrean Fields is a supervolcano with a diameter of 16 kilometers that was created by a mega-eruption 39,000 years ago. At that time, its torrents of fire destroyed all life within a radius of a good 100 kilometers. Around 10,000 square kilometers of land (approximately the area of Lower Bavaria) sank under a layer of ash up to 100 meters thick.
15,000 years ago, when 40 cubic kilometers of magma was released into the air, the supervolcano destroyed another 1,000 square kilometers of land, the ash clouds blown into the upper atmospheric layers caused a year-long “volcanic winter” around the world – similar to eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815 Because of bad harvests and epidemics, the following year, 1816, became famous in the USA as “Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death” and also in Germany as the miserable year “Eighteen Hundred and frozen.”
After the magma chambers beneath the Phlegrean Fields were emptied, the previously swollen ground sank 600 meters deep over an area of 90 square kilometers. After this super-eruption, the giant crater of the Phlegrean Fields was formed, two thirds of which lie on the sea floor. Dozens of small volcanic craters like the well-known Solfatara formed inside this caldera over the millennia that followed.
Another expert says everything is fine
A day after Mastrolorenzo’s interview, Francesca Bianco, director of the INGV’s volcanological institute, contradicted her colleague Mastrolorenzo to the ANSA news agency on Wednesday: “No data suggests that this is a precursor to an imminent eruption.”
Over the last decade, several measures have been taken to reinforce monitoring activities that allow the detection of earthquakes in real time. The Phlegrean Fields and Vesuvius have become “the best monitored volcanoes in the world”.