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Mount Etna erupts

Published: 18/02/2021 By The Abode Team

Catania's airport was closed on Tuesday as Mount Etna, one of the world's most active volcanoes, belched smoke in its most recent eruption. "We've seen worse," the head of the INGV National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology in the nearby city of Catania, Stefano Branco, told Italian news agency AGI. Estimating that the latest eruption from Etna's southeastern crater began late Tuesday afternoon, Branco insisted that the activity was "not at all worrying". Nevertheless, with small stones and ashes raining down, authorities decided to close Catania's international airport. Many such eruptions in the past have shut down the airport and covered Catania in ash.
 
Emergency authorities said that they were monitoring the situation closely in the three villages at the foot of the volcano: Linguaglossa, Fornazzo and Milo. Images showed a spectacular rose-coloured plume of ashes above the snow-capped summit, but the cloud had largely dissipated by nightfall, while lava flows continued to glow.

At 3,324 metres (nearly 11,000 feet), Etna is the tallest active volcano in Europe and has erupted frequently in the past 500,000 years.