Going out with a Bang

The term "fire in the belly" has been tossed around a lot these days, but I know someone who lives with her head in the clouds, and she might make you think twice next time you use the term.
Let me introduce you to her... her name, is Etna.

She is red headed with a fiery temper.
She is the liveliest wife of a guy I know named Vulcan, god of fire.

Meeting her was the highlight of our whole trip.

Etna is the biggest volcano in Europe and is still erupting, not dormant like Vesuvius, but erupting.
Click on this photo to make it bigger and try to look for the rocks exploding out of Etna close to the centre of the screen. We took this photo.

Etna is huge, unlike Vesuvius, Etna is well over 3,000 metres high that is over 11,000 feet high.
11,000 feet is nearly 3 times the size of, say, Mt Bulla.

Etna completely dominates the eastern coast of Sicily, the island that big booted Italy kicked into the Mediterranean.

We went to the top by a drive, a trip on a cable car, and another drive on a four wheel jeep (unimog).This is the view from inside the cable car.
We were only 500 metres or so from the top of Etna.

Being on the top of Etna was like walking on a black snow field, and it is hard to believe that in the winter there actually is snow there.


When it was 30 degrees Celsius at sea level, it was close to 15 degrees on the top of Etna, except the clouds, which were 30 degrees as well because they absorb the heat from the sun and are therefore very hot.

The clouds were easily within touching distance of us but they don't, I'm afraid, feel like cotton wool or something, they feel like air, you don't feel anything.
Etna was formed gradually over the last 500,000 years and has erupted unpredictably so many times in so many different places that it has 300 or more craters on the entire mountain.


The first photo I showed you on this post was one of Etna exploding, but it is a pity I can't let you hear what the sound is like. The sound is absolutely deafening, I saw a couple of people wearing earplugs up there. The sound is like thunder booming at the same time a fireworks display is happening, in fact you wouldn't be able to tell whether Etna was erupting, or fireworks/thunder were/was happening if someone recorded the sound.

The thing that makes Etna different to Vesuvius, is that:

1. I think Vesuvius is only a quarter or a fifth of Etna's height.
2. Vesuvius has only one crater, Etna has 300 or so.
3. Vesuvius builds up and releases (predicted to blow soon)in a massive devastating explosion, where as Etna is constantly releasing pressure.
4. Etna is so high up the ash is relatively harmless to neighboring towns (Taormina, Catania, Naxos and Zefferina) because the ash has a long way to fall, and by the time it reaches the ground, it is cold and clean, like dust. Vesuvius is so close to the ground the ash is lethal.

We stayed at Taormina and at night could see the red glow of Etna 50 km away.
Taormina is more than 2000 years old.

What is believed to make Etna so violent is that Italy is on the European Continental Plate where as Sicily is on the African Plate. By astonishing coincidence, Etna is on the crack in the earth's crust separating the two plates.

In 1669 was the most major eruption in recent history where a 14 km crevice opened spewing lava out of it like a red-hot river. The red-hot river reached the city of Catania and flowed into the water off the coast where you could after see boiling black foam.

Other major (not as major) eruptions have happened since then like the one in 1991, which lasted for 471 days. The years 2001 and 2002 also had major eruptions.

What I find irritating is how there was another major eruption 11 hours after we were there, we saw it on the "CNN News".


The airport in Catania was not destroyed, if it had been, we would have missed our flight to Athens...