As of: March 13, 2024, 7:00 a.m
By: Johannes Welte
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The Phlegraean Fields in southern Italy are considered a supervolcano.
(Archive image) © IMAGO/Antonio Balasco
The supervolcano near Naples shakes around 450,000 residents with new series of earthquakes; an eruption is possible at any time.
A scientist publishes a frightening vision of what this could look like.
Pozzuoli - The Phlegraean Fields have become restless again.
The supervolcano in southern Italy has picked up speed again in the new year after a break in November and December.
It has been rumbling again since the beginning of the year and the earthquakes are gradually getting stronger.
On Sunday (March 10), a swarm of quakes with nine tremors with a magnitude of up to 2.3 startled the citizens of the port city of Pozzuoli and its neighboring communities.
On Friday there were even over 60 tremors.
Florence geologist warns of horror scenario
The fear of an outbreak is growing again.
The Florence geologist Aldo Piombino has now drawn a worrying scenario of how the feared eruption could take place.
He expects a so-called phreatic eruption, a gigantic water vapor explosion, like the one that occurred on September 27, 2014 at Ontake in Japan.
63 hikers were killed.
Aside from volcanic tremors and uplifts that began only eleven minutes before the explosion, there was no warning whatsoever.
After the explosion, an ash cloud rose seven to ten kilometers high, and up to 50 centimeters of ash fell near the crater.
A three-kilometer-long deadly pyroclastic flow moved down the volcano's southern slope, surprising tourists trying to climb the volcano.
A video documented the outbreak.
A volcanic eruption can be devastating even without magma
“Most studies of volcanic hazard focus on magmatic eruptions and associated phenomena,” warns Piombino in his blog.
Researchers from the National Geochemical and Volcanological Institute INGV simulated a Plinian eruption in a video, similar to the one that occurred in 79 BC.
BC on Vesuvius devastated and buried the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii with pyroclastic clouds, ash and lava.
“However, dangerous volcanic events can occur even without direct intervention from magmas,” reports Piombino.
“In particular, phreatic eruptions, which are typically caused by extremely rapid heating and evaporation of liquids.” Because beneath the phlegraean fields, groundwater seeps so deeply that it hits the magma bubble at the depths.
“A deeper hydrothermal system fed by magmatic gases is sealed and creates enough overpressure to trigger explosive eruptions,” Piombino explains.
“This is the case in the Phlegraean Fields, where the geothermal aquifer is sealed by a thick layer of overlying waterproof materials.” In situations, the hot fluids could only rise through fractures.
“In other cases, the explosions can be triggered by excess pressure due to sudden drops, which closes the channels that carry the vapors to the surface,” explains the scientist.
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During a phreatic eruption, the ejection of ash, mud and blocks was limited to the immediate surroundings of the crater within a radius of a few hundred meters.
"In rare cases, blocks can be thrown up to a distance of one to one and a half kilometers and in a limited number of cases, ash showers are reported up to a distance of five to seven kilometers," he said.
The greatest danger, however, would come from the release of toxic or paralyzing gases.
As examples, Piombino cites phreatic eruptions in Dieng in Indonesia (1979, 149 victims) and Nyos in Cameroon (1986, over 1,700 victims) and White Island (New Zealand, 2019 - at least 22 victims).
Measuring instruments record the development at the Solfatara crater in the Phlegraean Fields.
© IMAGO/napolipress
But one thing in particular distinguishes the Phlegraean supervolcano from the aforementioned unpopulated volcanic mountains such as the Ontake: “Under normal circumstances, i.e. on volcanoes that are relatively far away from inhabited centers, the danger to things and people is low, while in densely populated areas such as In the Phlegraean Fields, both the emission of gas and the fall of projectiles can represent extremely dangerous events." Piombino warns: "The occurrence of such an event cannot currently be ruled out."
Nevertheless, Piombino concludes: “However, the monitoring network around Pozzuoli is certainly much more extensive than elsewhere, and for this reason I remain cautiously optimistic in this regard, since it is realistic to assume that fluctuations in both the pressure and the flow rate of the fumaroles as well as Signals that also occur in the seismic band can be detected.”