The volcanic eruption is at the end of book 12, pivotal to the whole thing, and the event heralded in the invocation of the muse at the beginning, when all the men are killed. It is much more than a Stromboli eruption. I spotted the similarity to Mt St Helens - which didn't, of course, have the sea affected. I was able to convince the Earth Science department of the OU, which included several vulcanologists, and didn't need to try very hard. They got me into the Bodleian to research.
I could not convince any classicists. They are determined to avoid any such interpretation of any texts. Hesiod described the fight between Zeus and Typhon melting rock so it flowed down the mountainside like iron smelted in Hephaestos' smithy.
Footnote in book: This is not a description of a volcanic eruption as there is no detail of lava issuing from a crater. The Chalybes were smelting iron at this period.
(My comment. Hesiod was not a vulcanologist. Faced with flowing lava, he would have gone the other way. If the Chalybes were smelting iron, they would have had a semisolid bloom needing hammering, not something flowing. Hesiod lived just around the corner from Methana, on which early lava flows still looked fresh when 19th century geologists looked.)
Tim Severin, in his book on the route of the Odyssey declares "Nowhere in Homer is there any description of a volcano" when trying to disprove the identity of Aeolos' island with Stromboli.
And actual classicists approached on the subject are dismissive. Homer includes sulphur in his description of the shipwreck because of the structure of the poem which includes sulphur when Odysseus cleans his hall. In both cases, the sulphur cleanses the sin against xenia. It provides symmetry in the poem. But it doesn't mean it wasn't a convenient eruption. It can do both things.
Probably Etna, judging from the sailing directions and the proximity of Scylla and Charybdis.
Apollonius of Rhodes certainly thought it was a volcanic region when he plagiarised and extended Homer for the Argonauts.
Incidentally, there is a body which does three retrograde motions during a year - Mercury. And Odysseus was reputed to be the greatgrandson of Hermes. I spotted that when doing a sort of diagram on the classroom wall for mounting children's work on the Odyssey, which was on a schools broadcast, and realised I was looking at something I had seen in a book called "Time Stands Still" by Keith Critchlow, which looks at megalithic acience. One of the things he does is to show how the planets appear from a geocentric view - Venus produces a pentagram, for example. And Mercury a triple looped pattern, which does not quite fit the year exactly.
The Woods did not notice that.