Etna expels smoke and ash in a spectacular new eruption

Mount Etna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, spewed smoke and ash in a new eruption on Tuesday, but Italian officials said it poses no danger to neighboring villages.

“We have seen worse,” Stefano Branco, head of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in the neighboring city of Catania, Stefano Branco, told Italian news agency AGI.

Estimating that the eruption of the southeastern crater of Etna began late Tuesday afternoon, Branco insisted that the latest explosion of activity “was nothing to worry about”.

Even so, with small stones and ash falling, the authorities decided to close Catania’s international airport.

The emergency authorities said in their Twitter account that they were monitoring the situation closely in the three villages at the foot of the volcano – Linguaglossa, Fornazzo and Milo.

The images showed a spectacular cloud of pink ash above the snow-covered summit, but the cloud had largely dissipated by nightfall, while the lava flows continued to shine.

At 3,324 meters (almost 11,000 feet), Etna is the highest active volcano in Europe and has erupted frequently in the past 500,000 years.

© 2021 AFP