I'm too lazy to look it up myself, but does anybody on here know if the Italian volcanoes are interconnected?
Originally Posted by: StoneCroze
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
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