A volcanic eruption hits volcanologist Boris Behncke on Mount Etna.
It was certainly frightening.
When I got hit I thought, 'This is really stupid.'
'I shouldn’t be here.'
“Boris!”
I’m Boris and I’m a volcanologist working on Mount Etna and other Italian volcanoes.
Etna is certainly one of the most active volcanoes on Earth. So Etna erupts virtually all the time.
Since Feb 2021, over 50 eruptions called paroxysms have rocked the region.
These paroxysms are characterised by the formation of huge lava fountains,
many hundreds of metres,
sometimes more than 1,000-1,500 metres high.
This eruption emitted approximately 100 million cubic metres of magma.
What might have become a possibly threatening and destructive flank eruption
became an extremely spectacular summit eruption.
What was maybe a bit more outstanding this year was the sheer quantity,
the sheer size of these paroxysms.
They were all big.
One million people live in Etna's shadow.
The 2021 eruptions have not been a direct threat to residents.
But the volcano is far from safe.
All active volcanoes are potentially dangerous.
There is no safe volcano.
Active volcanoes are not safe and sometimes potentially hazardous
and dangerous events can take place, also in conditions where you usually would not expect them.
There was this steam explosion in 2017, which involved a lot of people,
including a BBC crew and yours truly.
Was certainly frightening.
Given the quantity of rock projectiles that came down,
how are we going to get out of this?
When I got hit, I thought, 'OK, here we go.'
And thought, 'This is really stupid, I shouldn’t be here.'
Around 10 people were injured. Boris escaped with minor injuries.
But it’s not just explosions and lava that residents are worried about...
The main problem at Etna has been the fallout of what we call pyroclastic material.
Pyroclastic material is fragments of volcanic rock created by explosive activity
that rips the magma when it comes to the surface into fragments.
When this material falls over inhabited areas, it covers everything.
Sometimes pretty gloomy scenes.
You drive into that sector that has been stricken by the fallout maybe one hour before
and everything is black.
It becomes a continuous carpet.
And what happens is when this material lies on roads,
the roads become slippery, almost as though this were snow.
There have been deadly accidents.
One thing that they do here, unfortunately, is they use these these blowers.
They're blowing this material from one place to another, just to remove
it from a sidewalk maybe, and they create an enormous, enormous quantity of dust,
including the well known PM10 fraction which is
respirable and which can even get into your blood,
and that's where problems can become more urgent.
So people obviously already suffering from respiratory problems will have more trouble with that.
And there is also some suspicion that long-term exposure to these very, very
fine dust particles can lead to pathologies like cancer,
thyroid cancer and so on.
So these are all reasons why we definitely need a system to treat this material.
They have never planned for this.
There is no plan for this.
And you can understand that these people get really desperate.
They get really, really, really sick of it.
To give people the best chance to prepare for an eruption...
scientists have developed one of the best monitoring systems in the world.
Well, we do keep our volcanoes under surveillance.
We have seismographs.
We can measure how volcanoes swell.
We use GPS for that.
We use satellite, radar, strainmeters.
A microphone to record infrasound signals.
We measure gas emissions.
We measure magnetism and gravity.
We have video cameras.
We have thermal cameras.
We use radar.
So whatever can be used to capture volcanic signals is being used.
And yet it can only record the signals that the volcano is ready to give us.
People ask us, 'With all the instruments that you have,
with all those instruments,
with all the money that you get,
you're not capable of telling us what the volcano is going to do in the next 15 years?'
We can tell only things about what the volcano is going to do once the
volcano tells us.
It will certainly happen, there will certainly be the next serious and potentially
very destructive eruption of Etna.
There is no way around it, it’s inevitable.
There’s this old Japanese saying that,
in the moment that everybody will have forgotten the last disaster, the next one will strike.
People cannot imagine what can happen.
We do not know very precisely what process creates the magma that feeds Etna.
It's very, very fascinating.
It's sometimes a bit confusing, and there is a lot of mystery to it.
So how can we deal with future volcanic crises, future volcanic events?
Certainly, we cannot prevent them.
Certainly, the volcano is teaching us important lessons and we need to pass
them on to the people to tell them.
We need to tell them the mantra of international disaster mitigation and prevention,
which is awareness and preparedness.
There's a lot of work to be done there and we do it especially with the young people,
because they might be the ones that will change things.