The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #171994   Message #4174373
Posted By: Steve Shaw
12-Jun-23 - 04:24 AM
Thread Name: BS: KISS keep it simple
Subject: RE: BS: KISS keep it simple
Hmm. The CBS news piece is superficial and the story has been dumbed down by someone without much understanding of the science. However, it's true that level of concern in the Campi Flegrei area has risen. In the early 1980s the degree of uplift at Pozzuoli (bradyseism) was so alarming that 40,000 residents were evacuated, but that came to nothing. The eruption in 1538 was very small, throwing up a cinder cone (Monte Nuovo) about 500 feet tall. The real biggie was about 39000 years ago when a VEI:7 eruption (the Campanian Ignimbrite) deposited material over more than a million square miles. It was probably the biggest eruption in Europe in the last 200 millennia. It's been suggested that the eruption hastened the extinction of the Neanderthals. Ground uplift and sinking (bradyseism) is a feature of the area. That, and the rather frenetic minor earthquake activity in recent years, is monitored more closely than anywhere else on earth, I should think. The Campi Flegrei caldera, along with Vesuvius only a few miles away, between them potentially threaten around three million people. I know Pozzuoli (a workaday sort of place) and have visited the scary Solfatara crater just outside the town, sadly no longer accessible after a terrible accident there in 2017. The patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro, was beheaded in the crater in the fourth century and you can see his bones in a big urn in the crypt in the Duomo in Naples (the nearby archeological museum is much more interesting). The wonderful Sophia Loren has strong connections with Pozzuoli, which is just as interesting as the volcano.