Campi Flegrei volcano in Italy is hit by 150 earthquakes in just 5 hours

A wave of 150 earthquakes rocked the Campi Flegrei volcano near Naples last week, the largest swarm in four decades.

The seismic swarm began on May 20 just before 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. ET), which included a 4.4-magnitude earthquake recorded at a depth of 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) below the surface, experts wrote in a statement. The swarm continued for approximately 5 hours, causing panic among residents in neighboring towns, but no casualties were reported.

Al Jazeera reported that 39 families were temporarily evacuated from their homes, and small tremors were still felt around lunchtime on May 21.

“This is the most powerful seismic swarm in the last 40 years,” Mauro Antonio De Vito, a volcanologist and director of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) Vesuvius Observatory, told the news channel.

Campi Flegrei is the largest active caldera in Europe, and the volcano is showing signs that it may be creeping toward an eruption. A caldera is a type of crater that forms when the roof of a volcano collapses into a magma chamber as it evacuates during an eruption. Campi Flegrei last erupted in 1538; In the months leading up to that eruption, the ground swelled and rose by 66 feet (20 metres), then subsided again as the volcano spewed its supply of magma.

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The ground beneath the city of Pozzuoli, which lies near the center of the caldera, has been rising for the past 20 years, Christopher Kilburn, a professor of volcanology and geophysical hazards at University College London in the United Kingdom, said in an interview last December. 2023. Kilburn said the irregular patterns of earthquakes started increasing about 10 years ago and have been increasing ever since.

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Similar patterns of swelling and seismic activity, known as slow seismic crises, occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1982 and 1984, the ground in the Campi Flegrei area rose at a rate of 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) per month, triggering more than 1,300 earthquakes per month, according to an INGV statement.

Seismic events recorded between 00:00 CET on 20 May 2024 and 00:31 CET on 21 May. The greatest event (4.4) was recorded at 20:10 on 20 May. (Image source: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV))

“Most of them were too small to be felt, but they are starting to get larger, which residents can feel and raise the alarm,” Kilburn said. “And then everything stopped.”

The Earth has not retreated to pre-crisis levels in the 1970s and 1980s, meaning that every bit of uplift stretches the Earth's crust further. “Every crisis begins where the previous one left off,” Kilburn said.

The ground is currently rising at a rate of 0.8 inches (2 cm) per month, according to the statement, and there has been no change in that rate since the seismic swarm last week. About 450 earthquakes were recorded last month, compared to 1,252 in April 2024 — most of which had a magnitude of less than 1, according to CNN. Temperatures and carbon dioxide fluxes measured at the surface of Campi Flegrei also do not show any significant changes compared to recent months.

The cause of the swelling is still unclear. “There is some debate about whether the gas accretion, magma accretion or hydrothermal system was disturbed,” Kilburn said. Whatever the exact reason, “If you stretch something long enough, it will break somewhere.”

Following last week's seismic swarm, Gaetano Manfredi, the mayor of Naples, said the situation was “under control” and there was “no risk of an eruption,” Al Jazeera reported.

Experts told the news channel that the volcano is unlikely to erupt anytime soon.

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