The sphere accommodates the volcanic islets of Christina and Nea and Palia Kammeni, the underwater Kolumbo volcano that closing erupted in 1650, and the caldera created by way of an eruption within the past due Bronze Age.
Proof of a in the past unknown underwater eruption, one of the most greatest within the southern Aegean volcanic arc and older than the person who burnt up the Minoan civilization, has been came upon by way of a multinational group of scientists at the island of Santorini.
The invention “is rewriting Santorini’s geological historical past,” in line with Paraskevi Nomikou, a lecturer on the Aristotle College of Thessaloniki’s Geology Division and one of the most scientists at the undertaking.
The result of the group’s discovery were revealed within the Nature Crew magazine “Communications Earth & Atmosphere.”
In step with the paper, the group known an enormous pumice deposit, dubbed “Archaeos Tuff,” which implies {that a} shallow underwater eruption of Santorini’s prehistoric volcano happened round 520,000 years in the past (with a imaginable deviation of 10,000 years).
Skinny volcanic pumice deposits from the eruption lined 3 islands. Strikingly, this layer is six occasions higher than the pyroclastic float deposits of the good explosion that came about all through the Overdue Bronze Age (about 3,600 years in the past) and contributed to the decline of the Minoan civilization on Crete.
Chatting with the Athens-Macedonian Information Company after the paper’s newsletter, Nomikou defined that the lifestyles of those ash deposits additionally on land “highlights the significance of deep subsea drilling to show all of the secrets and techniques of island volcanic arcs, particularly in densely populated spaces such because the Mediterranean.”
As the brand new information display, the Christiana-Santorini-Kolumbo volcanic box used to be a lot more explosive within the far away previous than used to be in the past recognized, however in spite of this violent early historical past, it’s extremely not likely that the Santorini volcanic complicated could have every other eruption of this magnitude within the close to long run.
A mixture of deep drilling, massive multidisciplinary datasets, laboratory analyses and a dense community of marine seismic profiles have been used to find the submarine pumice deposit.
“The findings from the underwater exploratory drilling are converting the present figuring out of the volcanic arc of the southern Aegean,” Nomikou mentioned.
This oceanographic undertaking, performed from December 2022 to February 2023, concerned 32 scientists from 9 international locations.
