ESCALATION of ERUPTION RISKS by EUROPEAN SUPERVOLCANO. Alarming Study on Nature Geoscience about Campi Flegrei after Strong EarthQuakes
by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio
According to government authorities and some experts from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), there is no imminent danger of the eruption of the Campi Flegrei supervolcano, the seventh largest caldera in the world that could not only devastate the Naples area but also cause serious disruption throughout Central and Southern Italy due to the release of ash capable of at least causing the interruption of air travel (as happened in Iceland last summer).
Reassurances in this sense came after repeated earthquakes of increasing severity, culminating in the 4.4 magnitude earthquake on March 13, 2025, later reclassified as an even more serious 4.6.
“This variation, however, has a particular significance, because – net of the physiological instrumental uncertainty of the measurement – it would make that shock the most intense ever recorded in the instrumental era, therefore in the last 40 years or so, even if only slightly exceeding the earthquake of magnitude 4.4 that hit the Campi Flegrei on May 20, 2024”
explained the thematic blog Geopop (all links between sources).
The Dangerous Bradyseism of the Campi Flegrei
But a research published last January by the international scientific journal Nature Geoscience has raised the alarm on the risk of eruption by highlighting the signs of a phenomenon that could happen at any moment.
Well, this study was signed by Italian researchers from the INGV but it has not found much space in mainstream newspapers that follow the government strategy of not wanting to create alarmism despite the fact that there are now more than 300 displaced people in the Pozzuoli area, the closest to the mouth of the supervolcano, as we highlighted in our previous investigation.
In it we explained that the active supercaldera that is terrorizing the inhabitants of Naples has been characterized by bradyseism since 2005: that is, a periodic lowering or raising of the ground level, relatively slow on the human time scale but very fast compared to geological time.
“When the uplift speed increases, the system responds by producing a greater number of earthquakes at all scales, that is, both the number of small earthquakes and the number of stronger ones increase,” said Mauro Di Vito, director of the Vesuvian Observatory (INGV) and one of the most expert researchers on the volcano.
Bradyseismic intensity and earthquakes are, however, only two of the signs of the risk of magma rising and therefore of a possible eruption.
The third is that of gaseous emissions which represent a further danger factor
, in addition to the seismic and eruptive ones, of a geochemical nature “for the release of Co2 which, since it is heavier than air, especially in basements, can cause problems (too concentrated Co2 can also cause death and therefore it is extremely important to take control measures)” explains De Vito.
The Escalation of the Supervolcano in the Study Published by Nature Geoscience
The study by Italian volcanologists, whose first author is Dr. Stefano Caliro,
Senior Researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome and the Vesuvius Observatory, focuses precisely on these aspects and has an eloquent title: “Escalation of caldera unrest indicated by increasing emission of isotopically light sulfur”.
The research was also signed by Di Vito himself with other Italian volcanologists from INGV, others from the Department of Earth and Marine Sciences, University of Palermo, and some foreigners (B. Monteleone, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, MA, USA, and Z. Taracsák, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, UK).
“What happened is not unexpected, even if it is not possible to establish when an earthquake will arrive or what its intensity will be. We are at another stage of intensification of the bradyseismic process, as occurred in August 2023 and May 2024″ stated Francesca Bianco, director of the Volcanoes department of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in the press conference called after the earthquake of March 13, the most powerful since the beginning of the bradyseismic crisis, and the long swarm of tremors that followed.
“For now we are not measuring any type of process that gives us evidence of an imminent eruption. The data does not tell us that there is a rise of magma towards the surface”, she added.
But the summary of the study by Caliro et al. published on January 24, 2025 in Nature Geoscience seems to contradict the expert…
«Calderas are depressions formed by some of the largest volcanic eruptions. Their long-lived inter-eruptive periods are occasionally interrupted by phases of unrest, in which escalating seismicity, ground deformation and gas emissions raise concerns of potential volcano reawakening. However, interpretation of such physico-chemical signals is complicated by few examples of monitored unrest that culminated into eruption and by our fragmentary understanding of the drivers and timescales of caldera reactivation».
Volcanologists: “An Unprecedented Increase in Sulfur Release”
In the few lines of the research Abstract there is the alarming signal detected by researchers from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and their colleagues:
«Here we show that multi-decadal gas observations at the restless Campi Flegrei caldera in Italy record an unprecedented increase in isotopically light sulfur release from fumaroles since 2018. We then use hydrothermal gas equilibria and numerical simulations of magmatic degassing to propose that such a change in sulfur emissions results from decompression-driven degassing of mafic magma at ≥6 km depth, along with some extent of sulfur remobilization from hydrothermal minerals».
The conclusion should not let the government authorities sleep soundly…
«Examination of a global dataset indicates that, despite the diversity in eruptive behaviour and tectonic setting, increasing sulfur output may be a common process during unrest escalation at calderas generally. Hence, our observations and models of sulfur behaviour may inform interpretations of unrest and hazard assessment at reawakening calderas and hydrothermal active volcanoes worldwide».
The New Civil Protection Alert Plan
If in official declarations the institutions tend to want to avert the danger – as Nello Musumeci, Minister for Civil Protection, did in a ridiculous way when he invited us to “touch wood” out of superstition – in strategic acts the state of alert is palpable as also highlighted in the latest Geopop article.
«The head of the Civil Protection Department Fabio Ciciliano presented the draft of a new planning strategy, which for now is a proposal but which will come into force “as soon as possible”. This strategy allows for more effective intervention in the face of possible changes in the chemical-physical parameters of the caldera».
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The new volcano formed by the 1538 eruption
Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio
director of Gospa News
investigative journalist since 1991
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