Concern is mounting over the risk of an eruption on a sprawling volcanic area close to Naples after the area was struck by the strongest earthquake in 40 years.
Seismic activity on Campi Flegrei, a constellation of ancient volcanic craters, has intensified over the past year and especially in recent months, with more than 80 events occurring in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the biggest being a 4.2 magnitude quake.
“Considering that seismic activity has only increased in recent months, at the moment we don’t see an end,” Carlo Doglioni, the president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), told TGCom24.
Doglioni said the best-case scenario would be that the activity ends, as it did after a long period of unrest in the early 1980s, while the worst would be an eruption akin to the last one in 1538, which created a series of small hills and craters.
“We are monitoring the situation but we don’t know how it will evolve,” he said. “In the event of an eruption, we don’t know when or where it could happen. However small, it would cause social unrest.”
Campi Flegrei is home to at least 360,000 people across seven of the most at-risk inhabited hubs, including a part of Naples.
Unlike the nearby cone-shaped Mount Vesuvius, whose eruption in AD79 destroyed the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Campi Flegrei is a 7 mile-long caldera, or depression, that was formed 39,000 years ago after an eruption emptied it of magma. However, it is much more active than Vesuvius.
Thousands of small earthquakes since the 1950s have weakened the caldera, the basin at the top of the volcano, as the pressure beneath it builds, ripening the conditions for a rupture, according to a study jointly produced by academics at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and University College London (UCL) in June which concluded that the volcano was edging towards “breaking point” and in an “extremely dangerous state”.
Giuseppe De Natale, a director at INGV, said there was a “high risk of strong tremors”, adding that he had written to Naples council on 18 September suggesting safety checks be carried out on public buildings, starting with schools and hospitals, and for evacuation procedures to be enacted if necessary.
The earthquake on Wednesday, which was felt in Rome, caused people to flee their homes and trains to be disrupted, although no injuries or major damage were reported.
Nello Musumeci, minister for civil protection, said he would be meeting local officials in Naples over the next few days to ask for an “acceleration in the drafting of exodus plans in the event of an emergency”.
“We need to be ready for any eventuality, but we need to avoid alarmism because, at the moment, it is not justified,” he told Il Mattino.