In the afternoon of February 16th Etna gave a show. Inconvenience, but fortunately no danger, for the citizens of Catania and its province.
Videos and images of the spectacular eruption have been around the world. The paroxysmal activity affected the South-East crater with lava fountains and a column of smoke that covered the sky over Catania. The flow then poured into the Valle del Bove, far from inhabited centres. A rain of lapilli and lava ash affected the entire province.
The event led to the airport closure international of Catania, reopened only this morning.
“At 17:03 a more voluminous collapse occurred on the eastern flank of the cone, which generated a pyroclastic flow that traveled about 1.5 km on the steep western wall of the Valle del Bove. A few minutes later the explosive activity at Southeast Crater rapidly increased producing lava fountains several hundred meters high. Simultaneously, a lava flow poured into the area affected by the pyroclastic flow reaching the bottom of the Valle del Bove in about 15 minutes", explains the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, underlining that "paroxysmal episodes are a phenomenon typical of the recent eruptive activity of Etna. From 1977 to today, hundreds of episodes similar to today's have occurred, including the exceptional sequence of 66 paroxysms between January and August 2000, and around fifty paroxysms between 2011 and 2013”.
