Artificial intelligence reveals hidden 'ring fault' unleashing earthquakes at Campi Flegrei volcano in Italy

An artificial intelligence (AI) model has revealed never-before-seen geological structures at the Campi Flegrei volcano in Italy, including an apparent “ring fault” that could unleash earthquakes measuring 5 on the Richter scale.

So far in 2025, Campi Flegrei has produced five earthquakes greater than magnitude 4, and the volcano has shown signs of unrest since 2005. But most earthquakes that have occurred in the region have gone undetected, according to a new study that used artificial intelligence to identify tens of thousands of seismic events that have been under the radar for the past few years.

“We've known this is a risky place for a long time,” study co-author William Ellsworth, professor emeritus of geophysics at Stanford University, said in a statement. “Now we see for the first time the geological structures responsible.”

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Over the past 40,000 years, Campi Flegrei has produced two of the largest eruptions in Europe, and evidence suggests that the volcano's early history was equally explosive. Scientists have been recording unrest in Campi Flegrei since the 1950s, but monitoring efforts increased in the 1980s after 16,000 earthquakes led to the evacuation of 40,000 residents.

To investigate recent threats from Campi Flegrei, Ellsworth and his colleagues developed an artificial intelligence tool capable of identifying earthquakes that previous methods could not detect.

Traditionally, seismologists identify earthquakes by analyzing seismograms, which are graphs with wavy lines that represent shaking in the ground over time. Researchers are looking for a sudden increase in the magnitude of the oscillations, a process known as “phase selection,” said study co-author Greg Perosa, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University.

“It's a simple and often effective way to select a stage, but it doesn't learn how to do it better so that it gets better over time,” Peroza told Live Science in an email. “In our approach, we train a machine learning model to pick phases. We base that on a set of millions of examples where experts have already done this, and our method is designed to learn how to do it more effectively.”

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Peroza said the team chose to have its instrument analyze Campi Flegrei before other volcanoes for several reasons, including the urgent need to better understand this volcano's behavior. More than 360,000 people live within the 7-mile-long (11 km) Campi Flegrei caldera, and nearly 1.5 million people reside in the wider area. Unrest has increased over the past 20 years in 2018 – and although there are currently no signs of an eruption, a particularly violent or superficial earthquake could pose a significant risk to people as well as damage to buildings, according to the statement.

The results of the AI ​​tool, published September 4 in the journal Science, reveal that three-quarters of earthquakes in Campi Flegrei between 2022 and mid-2025 went undetected. While traditional methods documented 12,000 earthquakes during this period, artificial intelligence shows that the number was closer to 54,000 earthquakes.

By mapping the location of these earthquakes, researchers discovered faults — cracks in the Earth's crust that can rub against each other and cause earthquakes — that previous methods had not highlighted. It is worth noting that the team found two converging cracks under Pozzuoli, a town west of Naples where evacuations took place in the 1980s. Ellsworth said the location of these faults indicates that “a magnitude 5 earthquake is not out of the question.”

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By mapping recent earthquakes in the Campi Flegrei area, researchers have revealed several faults never seen before. This map shows two roughly parallel faults below Pozzuoli, which may cause spelling problems. (Image credit: Xing Tan)

This was not the only surprising result. Pozzuoli saw a rise in the 1980s, and the same thing is happening again now, with the ground beneath the city rising by about 4 inches (10 centimeters) each year. The uplift area was found to be surrounded by numerous faults, forming a thin, distinct “ring fault” extending offshore, according to the statement.

“Our Italian colleagues were surprised to see the ring so clearly,” the study’s lead author, Xing Tan, a doctoral student in Perosa’s lab, said in the statement. “They expected to see something in the south where previous data had revealed isolated earthquakes, but in the north, they had never seen it so clearly before.”

Seismic activity along the ring fault can help predict changes in the system, as well as hint at the magnitude of future earthquakes, Peroza said. But it does not provide new information about the probability or timing of the next Campi Flegrei eruption.

“All seismic activity analyzed from 2022 to mid-2025 is shallow, at depths of more than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) and does not indicate any migration of magma toward the surface,” Peroza said.

The team's findings on Campi Flegrei suggest that the AI ​​tool may be useful for other volcanoes as well. Places that have recently seen an uptick in seismic activity, such as Santorini in Greece, could benefit from a clearer understanding of the underlying geology, the researchers said in the statement.

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