As of: March 13, 2024, 9:46 a.m
By: Johannes Welte
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The Aeolian Islands are a dreamlike idyll.
An earthquake now reminds us of their volcanic origins.
© via www.imago-images.de
A violent earthquake shook the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily early Tuesday morning.
The island paradise consists of partly active volcanoes.
Lipari - The nine Lipari Islands (also called the Aeolian Islands) north of Sicily are a paradise for holidaymakers that have still been spared from mass tourism.
If you want to visit the picturesque cliffs of the “Italian Hawaii”, you have to take a ferry in Naples or Palermo. There are also excursion ships that leave from the mainland in Calabria and northeast Sicily.
Series of earthquakes in the middle of the Italian island paradise
There is no airport.
The islands include two active volcanoes, with Stromboli being particularly active and spewing lava fountains into the air every day.
On Tuesday (March 12), a magnitude 4.4 earthquake struck at 5:37 a.m. in the middle of this island paradise.
The epicenter was in the sea about 10 km northeast of the coast off the largest island of Lipari, halfway between Salina and Panarea.
The quake's hypocenter was extraordinarily deep at 243 kilometers.
At 1:10 a.m. there had already been a light earthquake of magnitude 2 on the western bank of Panarea, this time at a depth of only 16 kilometers.
A third earthquake of magnitude 3.8 followed at 10:37 a.m. about 45 kilometers northwest of Lipari in the sea at a depth of 314 kilometers.
The white fumaroles in the Sea of Lipari indicate volcanic activity beneath the seabed.
© INGV
Geologically very active area with volcanoes above and below the water surface
“For precisely this reason – and also due to the fact that the epicenter was in the sea off the coast – the earthquake was hardly felt there,” reports the Italian science magazine
Geopop.it.
No property damage or personal injury has been reported so far.
What's interesting is that near the epicenter there are the so-called white fumaroles. At a depth of just a few meters, hot air flows to the surface in bubbles, a remarkable spectacle for divers.
In addition to the nine islands formed by volcanoes, there are at least 19 other submarine volcanoes in the region.
The most feared is the underwater volcano Marsili north of the Aeolian Islands, where an eruption could trigger a devastating tsunami.
In 2018, a field of over 200 thermal vents, the “Valley of 200 Volcanoes”, was discovered on the seabed between the Aeolian Islands of Panarea and Basiluzzo Island at a depth of 70 to 80 meters.
On November 3, 2018, a gas explosion created a ten-meter-deep crater on the seabed.
Are the latest quakes the birth of a new volcano?
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The earthquakes and volcanoes of the region in the Tyrrhenian Sea are due to tectonic processes.
The neighboring Ionian oceanic plate east of Sicily is sinking beneath the Calabrian mainland.
“The piece of the earth's sinking crust is active and frequently generates deep earthquakes off the coast of Calabria and eastern Sicily,” explains Alessandro Amato, seismologist and head of the Tsunami Warning Center of the National Geochemical and Volcanological Institute INGV, to
MeteoWeb
.
The Ionian plate that submerged under Calabria is melted north of Sicily, the liquid rock rises upwards - and this is how the volcanoes of the Aeolian Islands are formed.
Italy: Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the region are usually harmless, but things can also be bad
Because of the smoke from the Ionian plate, the earthquakes are so deep that they are usually barely noticeable.
According to Amato, several earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 5 have occurred since 1985. One occurred during a seismic sequence on October 28, 2016 north of Sicily, with the hypocenter at a depth of 481 kilometers, i.e. in the deepest part of the plate.
On October 26, 2006, there was a magnitude 5.8 earthquake near the mainland.
It is therefore “a very active area with the characteristic ion subduction under the Tyrrhenian Sea,” says the INGV expert.
Every now and then there are more severe eruptions at Stromboli, like on July 3, 2019. © Mapsism/Facebook
The volcanoes that have formed in the island kingdom along fault lines in the earth's crust are also very active.
Stromboli erupted violently on July 3, 2019.
A tourist who was watching the volcano from the summit above the crater was killed.
On September 11, 1930, three islanders died from a pyroclastic flow of ash, slag, rocks and hot gases.
In 2002, an eruption caused part of the summit to slide into the sea, a tsunami damaged some houses on the shore, and lava bombs hit the villages.
The Aeolian volcanic island Vulcano last erupted between 1888 and 1890.
Just on Sunday evening, an earthquake at the foot of Mount Vesuvius frightened the people of Naples.
The neighboring supervolcano of the Phlegraean Fields has been causing unrest for months with hundreds of tremors.
At the end of February, a violent tremor in the Adriatic frightened people in Croatia and Italy.
A series of earthquakes also worried scientists in the Austrian-Bavarian Alps.