An intense swarm of earthquakes round Greece’s Santorini Island in January has revealed a fiery underground hyperlink between two neighboring and traditionally explosive volcanoes.
Analyses of seismic exercise from June 2024 by February 2025, together with modifications within the island’s floor elevation, recommend that the identical effectively of magma feeding the Santorini volcano may additionally provide the submerged Kolumbo volcano, simply seven kilometers away, researchers report September 24 in Nature.
Advanced, shared magma plumbing methods can complicate the interpretation of earthquakes and indicators of imminent eruptions, say Marius Isken, a geophysicist on the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany, and colleagues. This examine, they are saying, highlights the necessity for real-time, high-resolution monitoring to enhance volcano warnings.
Santorini is understood for a catastrophic volcanic eruption round 1560 B.C. that contributed to the tip of the Minoan civilization and brought about widespread devastation, together with earthquakes, tsunamis and probably a volcanic winter. Kolumbo isn’t any slouch both, erupting most lately in A.D. 1650.
When a swarm of over 1,200 earthquakes rattled the area early this 12 months, Greece declared a state of emergency, fearing an imminent eruption. Though no eruption ensued, the ample quakes allowed Isken and colleagues to look at the subsurface and higher perceive how and the place magma moved.
Utilizing knowledge from earthquake stations on each land and the seafloor, the group reconstructed the occasions resulting in the unrest. Beginning in July 2024, Santorini’s floor started to swell by a number of centimeters, suggesting magma accumulation in its shallow reservoir from deeper in Earth’s crust. The swelling coincided with seismic exercise centered round Santorini.
On January 27, the earthquake fee surged, with a brand new swarm of quakes migrating over a number of weeks first towards Santorini after which northeast away from the island. On the identical time, GPS knowledge confirmed that each volcanoes appeared to deflate.
The story, instructed in quakes and floor settling, means that magma from a deeper crustal reservoir feeds each Santorini and Kolumbo. The swarm of seismicity factors to magma transferring from this reservoir, initially towards Santorini after which away from each volcanoes, inflicting them each to deflate, like a simultaneous sigh.
That is the primary commentary of a magmatic connection between Kolumbo and Santorini, the group notes. And that has implications for different massive volcanic methods hypothesized to share magmatic plumbing, or at the very least to jostle each other underground, equivalent to these in Hawaii, Iceland and Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula.
