Mount Etna, or simply Etna, is an active stratovolcano on the east coast of Sicily, Italy, in the Metropolitan City of Catania, between the cities of Messina and Catania. It is located above the convergent plate margin between the African Plate and the Eurasian Plate. It is one of the tallest active volcanoes in Europe, and the tallest peak in Italy south of the Alps with a current height (September 2024) of , though this varies with summit eruptions. For instance, in 2021 the southeastern crater reached a height of , but was then surpassed by the Voragine crater after the summer 2024 eruptions.
Etna covers an area of with a basal circumference of . This makes it by far the largest of the four active volcanoes in Italy, being about two and a half times the height of the next largest, Mount Vesuvius. Only Mount Teide on Tenerife in the Canary Islands surpasses it in the whole of the European–North-African region west of the Black Sea.
Mount Etna is one of the world's most active volcanoes and is in an almost constant state of activity. The fertile volcanic soils produced from this activity support extensive agriculture, with vineyards and orchards spread across the lower slopes of the mountain and the broad Plain of Catania to the south. Due to its history of recent activity and nearby population, Mount Etna has been designated a Decade Volcano by the United Nations. In June 2013, it was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Etymology and mythology
One view is that the word Etna is from the Greek (), meaning "to burn", through monophthongization of the Ancient Greek pronunciation as seen in Koine Greek phonology, or possibly from a Siculian (or Sicanian?) dialect word (*aith-na, "the fiery one"?) of the same Indo-European origin, namely the root *h₂eydʰ- "to burn; fire".
Another view is that the name is derived from the Phoenician word meaning 'furnace' or 'chimney'.According to Adrian Room's book Place-names of the World. Room dismisses the hypothesis that 'Etna' has a Greek derivation. In Classical Greek, it is called (), a name given also to Catania and the city originally known as Inessa. In Latin it is called . In Arabic, it is called (, 'the Mountain of Fire'). According to both Roman and Greek mythology, Vulcan/Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing, had his forge under Mount Etna.
In Greek mythology, the deadly monster Typhon was trapped under this mountain by Zeus, the god of the sky and thunder and king of gods, and the forges of Hephaestus were said also to be underneath it.Aelian, Hist. An. xi. 3, referenced under Aetnaeus in William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
The volcano is also known as in Sicilian and in Italian, generally regarded as deriving from the Romance word / plus the Arabic word (), both meaning 'mountain'. According to another hypothesis, the term comes from the Latin (, 'he who placates the fire'), one of the Latin names of the god Vulcan. Today, the name Mongibello is used for the area of Mount Etna containing the two central craters, and the craters located southeast and northeast of the volcanic cone.
The name Mongibel is found in Arthurian Romance, as the name of the otherworld castle (or realm) of Morgan le Fay and her half-brother, King Arthur, localised at Etna, according to traditions concerning them derived from the stories told by the Breton conteurs who accompanied the Norman occupiers of Sicily. What were originally Welsh conceptions concerning a dwarf king of a paradisal, Celtic underworld became attached to the quasi-historic figure of Arthur as "Ruler of the Antipodes" and were then transplanted into a Sicilian milieu, by Bretons impressed by the already otherworldly associations of the great, volcanic mountain of their new home. Mediaevalist Roger Sherman Loomis quotes passages from the works of Gervase of Tilbury and Caesarius of Heisterbach (dating from the late twelfth century) featuring accounts of Arthur's returning of a lost horse which had strayed into his subterranean kingdom beneath Etna. Caesarius quotes as his authority for the story a certain canon Godescalcus of Bonn, who considered it a matter of historical fact of the time of Emperor Henry's conquest of Sicily . Caesarius employs in his account the Latin phrase ('within Etna') to describe the location of Arthur's kingdom.Bruce, Christopher W. (1999). The Arthurian Name Dictionary. Taylor & Francis. .Loomis, Roger Sherman Wales and the Arthurian Legend, pub. University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1956 and reprinted by Folcroft Press 1973, Chapter 5 King Arthur and the Antipodes, pp. 70–71.Loomis, Roger Sherman, Arthurian Tradition And Chrétien de Troyes pub. Columbia University Press, New York 1948, pp. 66 & 306.
The Fada de Gibel of the Castle of Gibaldar (Fairy of Etna) appears in Jaufre, the only surviving Arthurian romance in the Occitan language, the composition of which is dated to between 1180 and 1230. However, in Jaufre, while it is clear from her name that the fairy queen in question is Morgan le Fay, the rich underworld queendom of which she is the mistress is accessed not through a fiery grotto on the slopes of Etna, but through a 'fountain' (i.e., a spring) – a circumstance more in keeping with Morgan's original watery, rather than fiery, associations, before her incorporation into the folklore of Sicily.Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History ed. Roger Sherman Loomis, pub. Oxford University Press 1959, special edition for Sandpiper Books Ltd. 2001, Another Sicilian conception of the fairy realm or castle of Morgan le Fay is the Fata Morgana, an optical phenomenon common in the Strait of Messina.
History of volcanic eruptions
Eruptions of Etna follow multiple patterns. Most occur at the summit, where there are five distinct craters: the Northeast Crater, the Voragine, the Bocca Nuova, and two at the Southeast Crater Complex. Other eruptions occur on the flanks, which have more than 300 vents ranging in size from small holes in the ground to large craters hundreds of metres across. Summit eruptions can be highly explosive and spectacular but rarely threaten the inhabited areas around the volcano. In contrast, flank eruptions can occur down to a few hundred metres altitude, close to or even well within inhabited areas. Numerous villages and small towns lie around or on cones of past flank eruptions. Since the year AD 1600, at least 60 flank eruptions and countless summit eruptions have occurred; nearly half of these have happened since the start of the 20th century. Since 2000, Etna has had four flank eruptions – in 2001, 2002–2003, 2004–2005, and 2008–2009. Summit eruptions occurred in 2006, 2007–2008, January–April 2012, in July–October 2012, December 2018, and again in February 2021.
Geological history
Volcanic activity first took place at Etna about 500,000 years ago, with eruptions occurring beneath the sea off the ancient coastline of Sicily. About 300,000 years ago, volcanism began occurring to the southwest of the summit (centre top of the volcano), then activity moved towards the present centre 170,000 years ago. Eruptions at this time built up the first major volcanic edifice, forming a stratovolcano in alternating explosive and effusive eruptions. The growth of the mountain was occasionally interrupted by major eruptions, leading to the collapse of the summit to form calderas.
From about 35,000 to 15,000 years ago, Etna experienced some highly explosive eruptions, generating large pyroclastic flows, which left extensive ignimbrite deposits. Ash from these eruptions has been found as far away as south of Rome's border, to the north.
Thousands of years ago, the eastern flank of the mountain experienced a catastrophic collapse, generating an enormous landslide in an event similar to that seen in the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The landslide left a large depression in the side of the volcano, known as 'Valle del Bove' (Valley of the Ox). Research published in 2006 suggested this occurred around 8,000 years ago, and caused a huge tsunami, which left its mark in several places in the eastern Mediterranean.It has been suggested that this was the reason why the settlement of Atlit Yam (Israel), now below sea level, was suddenly abandoned around that time. See . This claim has been contested, however, as "there is no evidence of tsunami deposits, nor of sudden and catastrophic changes such as damaged structures, whole animal carcases or evidence of traumatic injury, such as might be expected to result from a tsunami event" (Galili E., Rosen B., Evron M.W., Hershkovitz I., Eshed V., Horwitz L.K. (2020) Israel: Submerged Prehistoric Sites and Settlements on the Mediterranean Coastline—the Current State of the Art. In: Bailey G., Galanidou N., Peeters H., Jöns H., Mennenga M. (eds) The Archaeology of Europe’s Drowned Landscapes. Coastal Research Library, vol 35. Springer, Cham). See also, Galili, E., Horwitz, L. K., Hershkovitz, I., Eshed, V., Salamon, A., Zviely, D., Weinstein‐Evron, M., and Greenfield, H. (2008), Comment on "Holocene tsunamis from Mount Etna and the fate of Israeli Neolithic communities" by Maria Teresa Pareschi, Enzo Boschi, and Massimiliano Favalli, Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L08311.
The steep walls of the valley have suffered subsequent collapses on numerous occasions. The strata exposed in the valley walls provide an important and easily accessible record of Etna's eruptive history.
The most recent collapse event at the summit of Etna is thought to have occurred about 2,000 years ago, forming what is known as the Piano Caldera. This caldera has been almost entirely filled by subsequent lava eruptions but is still visible as a distinct break in the slope of the mountain near the base of the present-day summit cone.
Mount Etna is moving towards the Mediterranean Sea at an average rate of per year, the massif sliding on an unconsolidated layer above the older sloping terrain.
Historical eruptions The first known report of an eruption at Etna is that of Diodorus Siculus, ca. 1400 BCE.
In 396 BCE, an eruption of Etna reportedly thwarted the Carthaginians in their attempt to advance on Syracuse during the Second Sicilian War.
A particularly violent explosive (Plinian) summit eruption occurred in 122 BCE, and caused heavy tephra falls to the southeast, including the town of Catania, where many roofs collapsed. To help with reconstruction after the devastating effects of the eruption, the Roman government exempted the population of Catania from paying taxes for ten years.
An eruption of Etna in 44 BCE was followed by famine in China (43 BCE), the Roman Republic, and Egypt, with Plutarch (among others) suggesting a causal link; however, an eruption of Mount Okmok early the following year is a more likely cause.
The Roman poet Virgil gave what was probably a first-hand description of an eruption in the Aeneid.Aeneid, edition of Theodore C. Williams, ca. 1908 [book III, lines 569–579]
During the first 1500 years CE, many eruptions went unrecorded (or records have been lost); among the more significant are: (1) an eruption in about 1030 CE near Monte Ilice on the lower southeast flank, which produced a lava flow that travelled about 10 km, reaching the sea north of Acireale; the villages of Santa Tecla and Stazzo are built on the broad delta built by this lava flow into the sea; (2) an eruption in about 1160 (or 1224), from a fissure at only elevation on the south-southeast flank near the village of Mascalucia, whose lava flow reached the sea just to the north of Catania, in the area now occupied by the portion of the city named Ognina.
Rabban Bar Sauma, a Chinese traveller to the West, recorded the eruption of Etna on 18 June 1287.The history of the life and travels of Rabban Sawma