The Greek islands of Santorini, site of one of history’s most colossal volcanic eruptions, are rumbling again. Santorini’s volcanic activity during the past 2-500,000 years has been dominated by very large explosive eruptions at intervals of few tens of thousands of years. The present-day crescent shape of the island of Santorini is essentially what remains of an enormous volcanic explosion dated back 3,600 years and which created the current geological caldera.
According to Science News, “Since January 2011, earthquakes have shaken the landscape and the Santorini volcano’s surface has lifted by about 140 millimeters — possibly because magma is rising from the deep and filling an underground chamber, scientists report in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters. ” Newman and his colleagues, including several at the University of Patras in Greece, began studying Santorini in 2006 and there is a lot of speculation that the Island of Santorini will erupt again one day. However the Science News Article went on to say, “If Santorini does erupt, it will probably be a small eruption like those seen there over the past few hundred years, most recently in 1950. Those eruptions have built up a pair of islands in the center of the now-drowned remains of the volcano, or caldera.”
Even if the Volcano on Santorini does erupt, the eruption won’t be anything like the infamous blast that occurred around 1600 B.C., says Andrew Newman, a geophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. That blast incidentally is the one associated with the Lost City of Atlantis.
