2023-08-09 21:45:45
Three underwater volcanoes have been discovered near the Sicilian coast, bringing to fifteen the number of known volcanoes in the Sicily Channel, the arm of the sea separating the island from North Africa, announced on Wednesday August 9, an expert at Agence France-Presse. “We discovered six volcanoes in 2019, plus the three from this recent discovery, but there are already five or six more listed”listed Emanuele Lodolo, geophysicist at the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS).
The three volcanoes discovered “are located at depths varying from 100 to 400 meters and the closest is about 7 kilometers from the coast” south-west Sicily, Mr. Lodolo said.
However, it is impossible to say whether these underwater volcanoes represent a danger for the population. “It’s like earthquakes, we are not able to make predictions. We cannot say that there will be no eruption. The important thing is to constantly monitor them”explained the geophysicist.
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Seventy Italian Volcanoes
The OGS specifies in a press release that a wreck of a ship was also discovered during oceanographic research carried out from July 16 to August 5, 2023 by an international team of scientists aboard the German ship Meteor. The unidentified wreck is that of a ship about a hundred meters long and 17 meters wide, lying at a depth of 110 meters and located halfway between the tiny volcanic island of Linosa and the Sicily. During their work, the scientists also took rock samples from the various underwater volcanoes.
“This information will be essential to reconstruct the geological history of one of the most complex regions of the central Mediterranean”estimated Matilde Ferrante, a scientist from the OGS who participated in the work, quoted by the press release.
When you think of Italian volcanoes, the first that come to mind are Vesuvius and Etna “and many people think that the Italian volcanoes are ten in total, but in reality we have counted seventy, of which a large number are submarine, ranging from Tuscany to Sicily and in the channel of Sicily »according to the website of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV).
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