Cold lava sweeps villages near volcano, killing 37

Mount Merapi in Sumatra with commentray on how human activity is making these incidents more frequent. .

Pity the BBC can't get its terms right and has dumbed down from using the word 'lahar'.

Yes, I read that and wondered about the flowing cold lava, a misnomer if ever there is such a thing.

But then you perhaps have a journalist using English as their second language and an editor who’s not versed in vulcanology posting this story. Confused?

From the article: 'The phrase cold lava is a translation of the term "lahar" in Indonesian and Tagalog.'

The term is a new one on me, and I earned a B in GCSE in geography at a grammar school! The closest we ever got was "pyroclastic flow" - but that's quite a bit hotter, of course. It could also be the fact that the teacher was hopeless: I remember he gave only the briefest attention to physical geography (as he "didn't like it"), and instead focused on the (to me, boring) human geography. We had more lessons on the Maasai tribe than we did on the entire topic of volcanoes and plate tectonics, for example.

Annoyingly I ditched geography for business studies at A level, as he was going to be the teacher of it... he then quit unexpectedly over the summer holidays, but it was too late to change. That was the end of my dream (at the time) of working in meteorology, as the careers advisor said A level geography was a must. Pah.

This one (currently) shows the full length of the fissure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5JBPyrjmaE  

That mega-caldera under the Bay of Naples would be a catastrophe if it ever went off.

Impressive lava fountains and fissure. Going by the last few eruptions there, this one will last longer than some.

And, going by the first link, a lot of lava too!

BBC Volcanoes page:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c340r9zgpnkt 

Volcano Updates - USGS

https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcano-updates 

Smithsonian / USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report

https://volcano.si.edu/reports_weekly.cfm 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cw0yjgwzldyo 

AFAIK Etna and Stromboli draw from the same magma reservoir though not directly connected. The reservoir is a low-silica basaltic type, h=which flows easily and typically gives a sequence of frequent but not especially violent eruptions, often descried as Strombolian. Stromboli has been in more or less continuous eruption for the last 5000 years. 

The contrasting type of eruption is Plinian, after Pliny the Younger's description of the eruption of Vesuvius which buried Pompeii. Plinian eruptions are sourced by rhyolite, a high-silica viscous magma, which tends to stick until the pressure is too great, and then it goes bang! Etna does this in a small way occasionally, but Vesuvius is exclusively Plinian; so presumably a different part of any magma reservoir even if it's all driven by the movement of the African plate and the Italian microplate against Europe.

The really alarming one is the Campi Flegrei caldera, a supervolcano underlying much of Naples which could blow any time, and has been producing rises and falls of several metres of ground level recently. When this blew about 40,000 years ago, the volume of ash ejected is conservatively estimated at 36 cubic miles (yes, the units are correct, and that's one of the lower estimates) and is thought to have wiped out early human and Neanderthal populations of Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegraean_Fields

I know a little about the Hawaii island chain and they were/are formed by magma coming up as the tectonic plate moves over a magma chamber hot spot.

Thank you for those thoughts. My son went Etna and other volcanoes on a school trip several years ago. I asked him to bring back some of the eruptions which he duly did. Very light black foam pieces.

On the same note, I brought back a lava bomb from Vestmannaeyjar in Iceland many more years before that. It has a dimple where it hit the ground red/white-hot.

I follow the Naples movements. If it ever does go off in our lifetimes or of course whenever, it will probably have a massive impact on European societies and further afield.

It's actually the magma which was at least 36 cubic miles (ash ejected was probably by multiples greater than that)

Vesuvius is, of course, part of that same Campanian Volcanic Arc that includes Campi Flegrei. In fact, the whole Bay of Naples is effectively a giant caldera.

Interestingly, and tying in with your first paragraph of that post, Roger, this Wiki article says:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campanian_volcanic_arc 

Having been to Naples, I can say that if a nearby volcano did majorly erupt, it would cause millions of Euros worth of improvements.

I stand corrected - it was some sloppy copying from Wiki which in the next breath goes on to say that ash covered much of Russia.

One way of putting it. A blessing introduced under a cloak of pyroclastic flows?

Of course we're spoilt for further explosive choices in that part of the world.

Further east into the Aegean, the huge Minoan eruption of Santorini in the 17th century BC may have inspired the legend of Atlantis. It was rated 7 in the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program's Volcanic Explosivity Index.

Today, the relatively new picturesque whitewashed Instagrammable houses would not be my choice of real estate (apologies for that Americanism) let alone a place to live. Why do people choose to live in or on active volcanoes?

Naples really takes the biscuit though.