Etna is one of the world’s most active volcanoes. This is a picture of an earlier eruption in May 2019
Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, blew smoke and ash into a new eruption on Tuesday, but Italian authorities said it posed no danger to the surrounding towns.
“We have seen worse,” the head of the INGV National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in the nearby city of Catania, Stefano Branco, told Italian news agency AGI.
The estimate that the eruption started from the south-eastern crater of Etna late Tuesday afternoon prompted Branco to insist that the latest eruption “is not worrying at all”.
Nevertheless, with small rocks and ash raining, the authorities decided to close Catania International Airport.
The emergency authorities said on their Twitter account that they were closely monitoring the situation in the three villages at the foot of the volcano – Linguaglossa, Fornazzo and Milo.
Images showed a spectacular rose-colored ash plume above the snow-capped crest, but the cloud largely disappeared by evening, while lava flows were still glowing.
At 3,324 meters (nearly 11,000 feet), Etna is the highest active volcano in Europe and has erupted regularly over the past 500,000 years.
Mount Etna eruption causes aerospace closure
© 2021 AFP
Quotation: Etna spits smoke and ash detected in spectacular new eruption (2021, February 16) on February 16, 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2021-02-etna-spews-ashes-spectacular-eruption.html
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