Mount Etna spewed smoke and ash in a new eruption this week, but Italian officials said the volcano, one of the most active in the world, poses no danger to neighboring villages.
“We’ve seen worse,” Stefano Branca, head of INGV’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in the neighboring city of Catania, told Italian news agency AGI.
Estimating that the eruption of Etna’s southeastern crater began late Tuesday afternoon, Branca 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.
Emergency officials said on Twitter that they are closely monitoring the situation 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.