What made Mount Etna's latest eruption so rare
Etna's latest eruption caused neither injuries nor evacuations, but sent a group of tourists on its flanks running, as captured by video posted on social media with smoke towering in the background.
Authorities emphasized there was no danger to the population, and the pyroclastic flow — a fast-moving mixture of rock fragments, gas and ash — was limited to about 2 kilometers (more than a mile) and didn't go beyond the Valle del Leone, or Lion Valley, which forms a natural containment area.
Etna has been active recently and this was the 14th episode since mid-March. The most recent pyroclastic flows with significant reach were recorded on Feb. 10, 2022, Oct. 23, 2021, Dec. 13, 2020, and Feb. 11, 2014, Marco Viccaro, president of Italy's national volcanology association, said Tuesday.
Advertisement
What's happening now
After a 19-day lull, Etna began to erupt with lively explosive bursts of gas and ash followed by a mild lava flow on the eastern slope followed by a smaller flow to the south.
At around 10 a.m. Monday, Etna exploded with its first major, violent eruption of the year: Lava fountains and a column of ash and gas rose several kilometers (miles) in the air. The event climaxed around 11:23 a.m. when the pyroclastic flow, triggered when magma mixed with snow, traveled 2 kilometers (more than a mile) to the Valle del Leone within a minute.
Advertisement
By late afternoon, scientists said the event had subsided.
Imposing figure
Etna towers around 3,350 meters (around 11,050 feet) above sea level and is 35 kilometers (22 miles) in diameter, although the volcanic activity has changed the mountain's height over time.
Occasionally, the airport at Catania, eastern Sicily's largest city, has to close down for hours or days, when ash in the air makes flying in the area dangerous. An aviation warning was put in place during the latest event, but the airport wasn't closed.
With Etna's lava flows largely contained to its uninhabited slopes, life goes in towns and villages elsewhere on the mountain. Among the benefits of the volcano: fertile farmland and tourism.
Deadly past
Inspiring ancient Greek legends, Etna has had scores of known eruptions in its history. An eruption in 396 B.C., has been credited with keeping the army of Carthage at bay.
In 1669, in what has been considered the volcano's worst known eruption, lava buried a swath of Catania, about 23 kilometers (15 miles) away and devastated dozens of villages. An eruption in 1928 cut off a rail route circling the mountain's base.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Mary Manios, Warren, Ohio
WARREN, Ohio (MyValleyTributes) — Mary Manios, 88, passed away peacefully, surrounded by her family, Wednesday afternoon, June 4, 2025, at St. Joseph Warren Hospital. Mary was born July 6, 1936, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a daughter of late George and Juanita Mitaras. Find obituaries from your high school Mary graduated as valedictorian of her class from Schenley High School in Pittsburgh. Immediately after graduation, she went to work for the Pittsburgh Pirates as personal secretary to Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Pirates. Her work with the Pirates and Mr. Rickey were some of the most memorable years of her life, where she formed lifelong relationships with people from the Pirates organization. While living in Pittsburgh, Mary met the love of her life, Franklin Manios, during a church outing. Shortly after, the two were married at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Upon moving to Warren, Mary worked briefly for Warren Savings and Loan. She then focused her time helping develop the filing system for her husband's business, Franklin Pharmacy in Warren. Mary was a key factor in the pharmacy's continued success because of her organizational skills. Mary enjoyed playing cards, getting together with friends, and listening and dancing to Greek music. If there was one thing she was great at, it was throwing parties and weddings. Mary also loved traveling, having traveled the world with her husband, Frank, through AHEPA and other different organizations. She particularly enjoyed trips to Greece, where she connected with her relatives and learned about her heritage. Mary was known for driving her three children and mother across the United States to sightsee and learn about different landmarks. One of her favorite destinations was her condo in Clearwater Beach, Florida. She was also an avid Pittsburgh sports fan, attending many Steelers, Pirates and University of Pittsburgh games, including some Super Bowls and championships. If she wasn't at a game, she was eagerly watching on TV. Mary's most important role was being a homemaker. She enjoyed sewing and annually made her children's Halloween costumes. Mary enjoyed preparing Greek delicacies for family and friends, especially her pastichio, tiropita (cheese pie) and her famous Greek spaghetti and rigatoni. She was an avid reader of books and encouraged her kids to always read and keep learning. She was an exceptional writer and had beautiful penmanship, writing the most beautiful cards and letters. Mary crafted most of her husband, Frank's, speeches for volunteer activities, which she would proofread and rehearse with him. She was also an advanced pianist and enjoyed playing the piano in her was a lifelong member of The Daughters of Penelope, Philoptochos Society of St. Demetrios and Trumbull County Pharmaceutical Wives Auxiliary. She was dedicated to living her life according to her Greek Orthodox faith. Mary faithfully read the Bible and attended church. She was dedicated to her family and the hobbies and interests of her children and grandchildren became her own. Mary's loving presence will be missed by all who knew her. Mary was a loving wife and will always be remembered by her husband of 70 years, Franklin R. Manios of Warren. She will be dearly missed by her children, Irene H. (Dr. Patsy) Buccino of Poland, Lee F. (Judy) Manios of Warren and Juanita G. Manios (companion, Theodore Powers) of Warren; grandchildren, Danny Buccino, Maria Stroup, Frankie Manios and David Manios; niece, Trina (Greg) Baldwin; and nephew, Lee Michael Manios. Besides her loving parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, Mary was preceded in death by her infant sister, Eleni; many loved cousins, especially Helen Florent, whom she considered a sister; and a brother-in-law, Michael (Sonia) Manios. Family and friends may visit and pay tribute to Mary 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, June 10, 2025, at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church, 429 High St. NE, Warren, OH 44481. A funeral service will follow at 11:00 a.m. Tuesday at the church, with the Rev. Constantine Valantasis and the Rev. Demetri Constantine presiding. Burial will follow in Oakwood Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in Mary's name to St.. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church, 429 High St. NE, Warren, OH 44481; or to Mercy Health Hospice of the Valley. Special thanks to the staff, doctors and nurses at St. Joseph Warren Hospital and to Mercy Health Hospice of the Valley. Very special thanks to all of Mary's caregivers and friends who helped take such good care of her. She loved you all, as well as Fr. Constantine Valantasis. Arrangements are being handled by the Peter Rossi & Son Memorial Chapel. To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Mary Manios, please visit our floral 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries
Thanks to the creative application of new technologies, the 2020s are quietly shaping up to be a golden age of archaeology. In 2023, then-21-year-old Luke Farritor (now with the Department of Government Efficiency) combined machine‑learning pattern recognition with high‑resolution CT scans to decipher the first word from the Herculaneum scrolls—a Roman library charred by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Fully decrypting the library could ultimately double the surviving corpus of Ancient Greek and Roman literature—an unprecedented bonanza for classical scholarship. Analysis of ancient DNA has resolved long-debated questions about human migrations. After sequencing hundreds of Bronze Age human genomes, David Reich's research team at Harvard positively identified southwest Russia as the geographical origin of the Indo-European languages, while other genomic work has dated Homo sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding to 47,000 years ago, several millennia prior to earlier best guesses. Fossilized human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, have been conclusively dated to about 23,000 years ago—proof that people were in North America during the last Ice Age and forcing scholars to rethink when and how humans first crossed into the New World. Lidar has recently revealed massive ancient cities under jungle canopies, from the Mayan platform of Aguada Fénix in Mexico—larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza—to mysterious urban centers in the ancient Amazon. These developments—whether driven by artificial intelligence, the decryption of ancient genomics, or airborne lasers—promise to momentously expand society's understanding of humanity's past. Notably absent from this bounty, however, are the fruits of traditional, physical, Indiana Jones-style archaeology. The world of bits, as has often been the case these days, is leaving the world of atoms in the dust. While the storied bits over atoms problem is a complicated one, legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery. The case of Italian antiquities policy is paradigmatic. Since the 1930s, Italy—along with Greece, Turkey, and Egypt—has vested ownership of all antiquities in the state. Commerce in freshly unearthed artifacts is outlawed, and unauthorized excavation is punishable by hefty fines and sometimes prison time. Even using a metal detector requires a permit. Edward Luttwak, a historian and author of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, explains that in Italy, "if you find something, you report it to the authorities. The authorities take it, goodbye. Most often, what they take from you, they put in a depot, a basement, a warehouse, and it never even gets shown." This is the unfortunate lot of the fortunate discoverer of an Italian artifact. Report a Roman coin? It'll be confiscated. Find an Etruscan urn while planting olives? Your land will be turned into an archaeological site the government may never have time to excavate. It's unsurprising, then, that Italians frequently don't report their findings to the government. Many artifacts end up on the black market (in 2023, Italy's Carabinieri Art Squad seized nearly 70,000 illegally excavated artifacts), or are even simply destroyed or hidden away. Private hoarding is an especially pernicious problem: When "illegally excavated" (read: most) Italian artifacts are privately held in people's houses, they are lost both to scholarship and public view. "You could fill twice the museums that exist in Italy from what people have hidden in their houses," says Luttwak, "which they wouldn't hide if you could report [them] to the authorities like they do in England." The British model provides a striking contrast. Since the 1996 Treasure Act, British law has required that significant archaeological finds be reported. Instead of simply seizing them, if the state wishes to retain an item, it must compensate the finder and landowner at its full market value. To capture the far larger universe of objects that fall outside the law's narrow legal definition of "treasure," the state-sponsored Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) established a voluntary nationwide program through which average Britons can log any find, whether or not the state intends to acquire it, into an open scientific database. As of 2020, over 1 million objects have been logged in PAS. According to Michael Lewis, head of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, over 90 percent of PAS-recorded items are found by metal detectorists on cultivated land, indicating how the scheme has turned what was once seen as a threat into a fountainhead of archaeological data. Thanks to these policies, Britain has been increasingly outpacing Italy in Roman archaeology despite its relatively modest classical history, as seen in this viral map of the provenance of hoards of Roman coins. Notice the sheer quantity of Roman coin discoveries reported in the U.K., far surpassing those in Italy. This disparity isn't explained by Roman Britain being richer than Roman Italy (quite the opposite), but by modern Britain recognizing and leveraging incentives to bring history out of occultation. The Great Stagnation of physical archaeology is a choice. The failure of policymakers to get the basics right—to make physical archaeology worth anyone's time—renders the richest landscapes fallow. Luttwak's attention is on one such landscape: the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers on the edge of Cosenza, Calabria. Contemporary accounts record that in 410 A.D. the Visigoth chieftain Alaric—fresh from sacking Rome—was buried beneath the temporarily diverted river along with the treasures of the Eternal City. "Alaric's treasure is located in the southern part of the city of Cosenza," says Luttwak. "It was documented by an eyewitness." Alaric took "gold and silver objects…statues, and all kinds of things—possibly even the Temple menorah….When Alaric died in Cosenza, he got as the king one third of the treasure [to be] buried with him." "It could be found," explains Luttwak, "with hovering metal detectors, because he was buried with his weapons, too." Alaric's hoard—and maybe Judaism's most iconic physical symbol—should be discoverable today with an aerial anomaly survey and some clever hydraulics. The technology is ready; the incentives are not. Change the rules, and the payoff could be extraordinary. The post The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries appeared first on
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
A 1,500-Year-Old Map Helped Researchers Find a Lost Byzantine City
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Researchers recently found one of the many lost Holy Land cities in Jordan. The team used maps and field surveys to identify the site. Experts believe the lost city Tharais wasn't just an agricultural village—it may have also been a spiritual hub. The Madaba Mosaic Map is perhaps the most famous geographical masterpiece of the ancient Near East. Believed to have been built during Emperor Justinian's reign (527-565 A.D.), the tile art piece is the oldest surviving map of Jordan's Holy Lands. The map is located in Madaba, Jordan, and depicts a total of 157 sites—many of which have yet to be found. One of the many lost cities is a place called Tharais, which dates all the way back to the Byzantine Empire. And researchers might have just found it. Starting in 2021, a research team led by Musallam R. al-Rawahneh—an associate professor of archeology and ancient Near East studies at Mutah University—began looking for Tharais. The field project lasted until 2024, and the team recently published their findings in the journal Gephyra. Finding a lost city is no easy task, and researchers had to use several different methods to track down Tharais. Maps, including both the Madaba Mosaic and more contemporary maps, gave researchers a starting baseline. They then conducted a field survey near a modern city near the southeastern edge of the Dead Sea called El-'Iraq. There, researchers found remnants of mosaic floors, glassware, and various tools—all compelling evidence that that was where Tharais once thrived. Most notably, the team uncovered features resembling a Byzantine basilica—an oblong building with an open-air central room. Collaborative efforts with other institutions from Spain and France added further evidence to the scene when researchers discovered Greek and Latin funerary inscriptions. These inscriptions suggest the existence of a Christian community in the area, supporting the theologic identity of the site. A doorway consistent with architecture in Byzantine churches was also found, further affirming the site's supposed history. In short: all signs point toward religion. 'The prominence of Tharais on the Madaba Map and the discovery of a basilica church structure suggest that it served not only as an agricultural village but also as a sacred site and commercial rest stop,' al-Rawahneh said in a Türkiye Today report. And according to the team, the presence of religion didn't weaken the city's economy. The presence of olive oil presses, windmills, and grape crushing equipment suggests that Tharais was economically self-sustaining. Perhaps the most convincing indications of the site's true identity are the parallels between the structures found by the researchers and the Madaba Mosaic Map. The arrangement of gates, ruins, and even towers closely match the map's depiction of the lost city. As for the future of Tharais, the team says that they wish to preserve the area from El-'Iraq's rapid urbanization. 'Our aim is not just to uncover Tharais,' Al-Rawahneh explained in the report, 'but also to advocate for the protection of Jordan's rich cultural heritage.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
