A supervolcano caused the largest eruption in European history. Now it's stirring again.
Source: Washington Post
December 21 at 1:38 PM
The Italian name for the caldera Campi Flegrei, or burning fields is apt. The 7.5-mile-wide cauldron is the collapsed top of an ancient volcano, formed when the magma within finally blew. Though half of it is obscured beneath the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean, the other half is studded with cinder cones and calderas from smaller eruptions. And the whole area seethes with hydrothermal activity: Sulfuric acid spews from active fumaroles; geysers spout water and steam and the ground froths with boiling mud; and earthquake swarms shudder through the region, 125 miles south of Rome.
And things seem to be heating up. Writing in the journal Nature on Tuesday, scientists report that the caldera is nearing a critical point at which decreased pressure on rising magma triggers a runaway release of gas and fluid, potentially leading to an eruption.
Forecasting volcanic eruptions is a famously dicey endeavor, and right now, it's impossible to say if and when Campi Flegrei might erupt, according to lead author Giovanni Chiodini, a volcanologist at the National Institute of Geophysics in Rome. But now more than ever, the caldera demands attention: An eruption would be devastating to the 500,000 people living in and around it.
<snip>
Today, the Campi Flegrei caldera is increasingly restless. For half a century, scientists have measured bradyseism events slow movements of the ground that are indicative of molten rock slowly filling the mountain's magma chamber. Significant uplift in the past decade prompted Italian authorities to raise the supervolcano's alert level from green (quiet) to yellow (scientific attention) in 2012.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/12/21/a-supervolcano-caused-the-largest-eruption-in-european-history-now-its-stirring-again/
MADem
(135,425 posts)There's an area where you can go up and see stinking, farty, suphuric steam coming out of holes in the ground. The ground gets very hot, too.
lamp_shade
(14,796 posts)Warpy
(110,906 posts)Campi Flegrei is, of course, the entire source for the Christian version of hell. Dante undoubtedly used it as his inspiration.
I read some years ago that people in Pozzuoli, the main city on the peninsula, had started to evacuate because the poisonous gases had been increasing and their houses had started to crack. Since it's still a thriving metropolis and tourist town for people who want to visit hell, I would imagine the danger subsided as soon as the story got published. Humans are like that.
I'm not surprised this monster is stirring again, it's been a long time since it last erupted. Oddly enough, I'm not as dismayed about my eventual demise at the hands of Mother Nature as I would be at the hands of the Orange Menace lobbing nukes at everybody who hurt his tender little feelings.
madokie
(51,076 posts)right now we're listening to an old Neal Young recording.
briv1016
(1,570 posts)I was hoping for a giant asteroid, but a supervolcano works too.
then we would have to listen to all the end times nut jobs, you know, the same ones that voted for sniffles.
LeftInTX
(24,549 posts)OnlinePoker
(5,702 posts)Though they were later freed, these scientists were all convicted of manslaughter in 2012 for not predicting a 2009 earthquake in Italy.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-20025626
BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)Quackers
(2,256 posts)N_E_1 for Tennis
(9,593 posts)Stuckinthebush
(10,816 posts)That would be catastrophic.
christx30
(6,241 posts)And once it blows it will cover a huge amount of the Earth with a cloud of ash, and cause almost a nuclear winter.
So, yes, I will have another beer.
pfitz59
(10,198 posts)Imagine if Yellowstone had a city the size of Chicago plopped down on top of it, with the climate of Los Angeles..... you have Naples and its volcanoes (and fumaroles, hot springs and other steaming features)