Researchers have discovered an ancient underwater volcano off the coast of the southern Italian island of Ischia, near the area known as Campi Flegrei.
The discovery, published in the journal Geomorphology, is thanks to a group of Italian scientists from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council (CNR-Ismar), who found these geological structures thanks to magnetic anomalies detected during aerial and naval surveys.
“One of the main results of our study is the identification, based on the morphological analysis of the seabed and genetic anomalies, of a large caldera never described before,” said Riccardo De Ritis, researcher at INGV and first author of the article.
A caldera is a concavity that forms after the collapse of a volcano's magma chamber following a massive eruption. "This discovery could be important for understanding the evolutionary history and volcanic activity of the Campi Flegrei and the island of Ischia," added De Ritis.
The data also revealed a vast underwater landslide tens of kilometers across, which may have been the result of events linked to the instability of volcanic slopes, revealing for the first time the underwater geology of this area of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“The study opens up important reflections for the mitigation of volcanic risk in one of the most densely populated areas of Italy,” said Salvatore Passaro, a researcher at CNR-Ismar and co-author of the study.
The Campi Flegrei region (an ancient Greek term meaning “burning fields”) is home to an underground supervolcano in Naples, southern Italy, and has been experiencing a phase of “bradism”, a phenomenon that raises the ground level from gas and magma accumulated in the depths.
Unlike Vesuvius, which dominates the Neapolitan landscape, the Campi Flegrei does not have a single main volcano, but rather several craters spread across a caldera. At the end of June 2024, the Italian government approved a decree allocating 440 million euros (R$2,8 billion) to prevent seismic risk in the region. (HANDLE)
