Three new underwater volcanoes were discovered on Wednesday, August 9, near the Sicilian coast. The channel linking the Italian island and North Africa would thus include about fifteen. “We discovered six volcanoes in 2019, plus the three from this recent discovery, but there are already five or six others listed, or about fifteen submarine volcanoes,” said Emanuele Lodolo, geophysics expert from the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS).
These three discovered volcanoes “are located at depths ranging from 100 to 400 meters and the nearest is about 7 kilometers off the coast” of southwestern Sicily, Lodolo said. It is impossible to say, however, if these underwater volcanoes represent a danger for the population: “It’s like for earthquakes, we are not able to make predictions. We cannot say that there will be no eruption. The important thing is to constantly monitor them. »
The OGS said in a statement that a wreckage of a ship was also discovered during oceanographic research carried out from July 16 to August 5, 2023 by an international team of scientists aboard the German ship Meteor. The unidentified wreck is that of a ship about 100 meters long and 17 meters wide, lying at a depth of 110 meters and located approximately halfway between the tiny volcanic island of Linosa and Sicily.
During their work, the scientists also took rock samples from the various underwater volcanoes. “This information will be essential to reconstruct the geological history of one of the most complex regions of the central Mediterranean,” said Matilde Ferrante, an OGS scientist who participated in the work, quoted by the press release.
When we think of Italian volcanoes, the first that come to mind are Vesuvius and Etna “and many people think that the Italian volcanoes are about ten in total, but in reality we counted 70, including a large many are submarines, ranging from Tuscany to Sicily and in the Sicily Channel,” according to the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) website.
