The Sicilian volcano Etna, very close to the port city of Catania (east coast), experienced a new eruption on Tuesday, spectacular but without danger, causing a rain of small volcanic stones and ash on this city whose airport was closed .
The subsidence of part of the south-eastern crater of the famous volcano caused an overflow and a slide of lava along the western wall, which however does not put at risk the inhabited villages near the volcano, said an official of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) at the Agi agency.
“We have seen worse”, commented Stefano Branca, director of Ingv in Catania, judging that the event which started at the end of the afternoon “was not at all worrying”.
The firefighters signaled in the early evening on their Twitter account that they were nevertheless monitoring the evolution of the situation in three small towns at the foot of the volcano, Linguaglossa, Fornazzo and Milo.
The images of the eruption show in the late afternoon an impressive pink plume of ash above the snow-capped summit of the volcano. At nightfall, this cloud had largely dissipated, but Etna was still the scene of many incandescent lava flows.
Etna, with an area of 1250 km2, is the highest active volcano (3324 meters) in Europe, with frequent eruptions for around 500,000 years.