• 02/01/2023
• By wizewebsite
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Somehow Etna, Europe's largest volcano is under water. She remains active and mysterious<

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With a height of about 3,000 meters from the bottom of the giant volcano named after the Italian mathematician, it is about half a kilometer away from crossing the surface of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Like the sunshine, she managed to avoid people's attention thanks to it. Scientists have only been paying more attention to it for about 20 years and estimate that in the worst-case scenario, the volcano can devastate the coast of Sicily and Calabria with a 20-meter tsunami wave. However, as the BBC wrote in an article entitled "The enigma of Europe's sinking monster", there is a lack of further information.

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The discovery of Marsili, which lies about 175 kilometers south of Naples, dates back only 100 years. The discovery was made thanks to the boom in seabed exploration in the 1920s. The latter was motivated by the development of submarines and communication systems guided by cables along the bottom of the seas and oceans. The volcano was formed about a million years ago, and in one of its few studies published in 2014, scientists estimated the last eruption to be several thousand years ago. The main conclusions of the study also state that the volcano is active and would deserve closer monitoring. And what the BBC recently wrote with reference to Italian experts is still true today.

The Italian expert Guido Ventura from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology described today's volcano activity to the BBC as a gentle rumbling accompanied by gas emissions and low-energy tremors. However, this does not rule out more dramatic activity in the future.

Ventura explained that if an eruption were to occur, unlike volcanoes on the surface, the lava or ash would almost certainly not harm the people nearby because none of it would rise above the water. "It's not the eruption itself that's dangerous, but the potential underwater landslide," Ventura said. This scientist participated in a study published last year investigating, among other things, the susceptibility of volcanoes at the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea to collapses and subsequent tsunamis in the event of an eruption.

Scenarios predict waves from a few cm to 30 m high

Specifically, the Marsili volcano was the subject of research published this year, in which scientists modeled five different scenarios that could occur if the Marsili eruption actually occurred. Their character varies according to how much of the volcano would collapse.

According to optimistic scenarios, the displacement of water caused by the landslide would be small, and waves of only a few centimeters would be made on the surface. More serious would be the collapse of the northwest flank of the volcano, which would cause waves 3 to 4 meters high, which would reach the coast in about 30 minutes and decrease by a meter in the meantime. The worst-case scenario counted on the collapse of the southern part of the peak and the eastern wing. This could cause a 30-meter tsunami that would flood Sicily and Calabria within 20 minutes with a slightly smaller height of 20 meters.

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What kind of damage and loss of life such a large wave would cause would depend to a large extent on the time of year. In the summer, when the beaches are full of sunbathers and the coastal population density is increased by tourists, it would be significantly worse. According to Galotti's team's models, the wave could threaten anyone within a kilometer of the sea.

The risk of an eruption is apparently low, but scientists cannot calculate it

As for calculations, with what probability an eruption can occur and what scenario it could bring, scientists are at a loss. "We simply don't have enough data," said Glauco Gallotti of the University of Bologna, the head of this year's study, explaining the current situation to the BBC.

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From the fact that the activity of the volcano is relatively weak and the last eruption occurred several thousand years ago, it is nevertheless evident that the risk of an eruption in the foreseeable future is not high.

The volcano deserves more surveillance and Italy a warning system

However, scientists do not want to be satisfied with this. "It is clear that Marsili needs to be monitored," Ventura said, adding that it should also be considered that "under the surface of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Strait of Sicily there are at least 70 volcanoes whose history is in some cases completely unknown".

Galotti also agrees with this. According to scientists, the Italian government should start taking action to be able to predict and warn against an unlikely but still real threat. Currently, according to the BBC, the country has no monitoring or tsunami warning system to handle this. Both scientists agree that with today's technology, setting up something like this is possible and not too difficult.

The BBC adds that a tsunami in the region has probably already occurred once, from a geological point of view, relatively recently. In addition to the records of the Italian writer Francesco Petrarch about the "devastating storm" that devastated the port of Naples in 1343 and killed hundreds of people, this is also indicated by the results of research by scientists from the State University of New York, who linked the event to the eruption of the Stromboli volcano. The last time it caused a tsunami was in 2002. But the waves were low and did not reach the coast. There was no loss of life.