Researchers warn of a possible catastrophe but stress that further investigation is needed to determine the seriousness of the situation.
East of the southern Italian city of Naples lies the famous volcano Vesuvius, which erupted in 79 BC. Destroyed Pompeii. Heading west from central Naples brings you to the base of another volcano: the lesser-known Campi Flegrei (The Phlegraean Fields). While Mount Vesuvius has been relatively active for the last few centuries, Campi Flegrei has not erupted in 500 years. But today researchers are warning of a possible major eruption of the Campi Flegrei, which means “burning fields” in ancient Greek.
Campi Flegrei is known as a supervolcano, a term given to volcanoes that can erupt over 1000 cubic kilometers of ‘material’. Supervolcanoes can often be identified by their craters, as the eruption can be so violent that the volcano self-destructs, leaving a crater in its wake. Technically, the Neapolitan volcano is not a true supervolcano. Campi Flegrei’s largest eruption 39,000 years ago wasn’t big enough to be called a “supervolcano,” but it was close.
The Campi Flegrei crater has not erupted since 1538, but changes in the earth have been observed since 2005. Researchers from University College London and Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology are therefore monitoring the volcano’s geological activity with seismic observations to determine the likelihood of an eruption.
And it looks as if the earth’s crust under Campi Flegrei is about to crack. “The supervolcano has a crust that is becoming weaker and more prone to cracking, making an eruption imminent,” said the study’s lead author Christopher Kilburn, professor of volcanology at University College London. The researchers caution, however, that these results don’t necessarily mean an outbreak is coming anytime soon.
“The rupture can create a crack in the earth’s crust, but for an eruption to occur, the magma still has to be pushed to a specific location,” says Prof. Kilburn. The underground riots are likely due to volcanic gas seeping into the earth’s crust three kilometers below Campi Flegrei, where the volcano soaks it up like a sponge.
This causes the earth’s crust to stretch and twist, leading to earthquakes. If enough volcanic gas penetrates the crust, the heat and gas pressure in the crater can reach the “critical outgassing pressure,” causing it to rupture and opening a fissure for magma to escape during an eruption.
Since the 1950s, gas and magma have slowly deformed and weakened Campi Flegrei’s crust below the surface, leaving it capable of withstanding only a third of the pressure it could withstand in 1984, the study said. Kilburn says it’s impossible to predict when and if the volcano will erupt, but that an eruption would be “very dangerous” for the 500,000 people who live near the Campi Flegrei crater. Worst-case scenario, Campi Flegrei’s recent eruption would repeat itself, as the volcano would send molten rock and volcanic gases up into the stratosphere, triggering 110-foot-tall tsunamis and spreading clouds of sulfur and sulfur. toxic ash, leading to crop failures, mass extinctions of species and a long winter period on earth. Therefore, it is better to deny this catastrophic scenario…