Does it then become an obsession?
In the summer of 2016 Sue decided she wanted to go to Sicily on a family holiday and all I could see was an opportunity to explore another mountain. Mongibello, to give it its Sicilian name, Mount Etna to the rest of the world. Sure, it would account for only one day of an eight day trip; and sure, I wouldn’t subject Sue and the kids to whatever is required to summit; but it did have to be included in some way or another, even if it meant a day out on my own while the others rested on the beach.
And of course you can’t actually summit Mount Etna on account of the fact that it is one of the most active volcanoes in the world and is in an almost constant state of activity. It is the tallest active volcano in Europe, currently 3,329 m (10,922 ft) high, though “this varies with summit eruptions”. There have been no fewer than fifty four eruptions since 1950, and volcanodiscovery.com reports “violent strombolian activity”, i.e. explosions of red hot lava, as recently as May 25th 2016 (and will further report “intermittent small ash emissions” three days after our visit). It is just too dangerous to go right onto its explosive peak.
Instead we spent a few hours at the relatively modest height of 2,000 metres exploring a number of extinct craters, and the lava flows that resulted from a 2002 eruption which threw up a huge column of ash that could be seen from space and fell as far away as Libya, 600 km (370 miles) south across the Mediterranean Sea. Seismic activity in this eruption caused the eastern flanks of the volcano to slip by up to two metres, and many houses on the volcano experienced structural damage. The eruption also completely destroyed the tourist station Piano Provenzana, on the north eastern side of the volcano, although it was then in the process of being rebuilt. As we walked across a lava flow we could see the roof of what was once a hotel poking out from beneath the black rock.
The lava flows were unmistakable, cutting a wide swathe of blackened rock through the otherwise green pine forests, frozen in time as they cooled and darkened, like deadly black glaciers. The skeletons of some trees remained standing amongst the rock, stripped of all their bark and leaves, looking both forlorn and resolute at the same time. And already some plants had begun to recolonise the land and taken root in the otherwise barren lava flows. The extinct craters are neatly circular, broodingly silent and perilously steep.
The contrast of lush green pine and barren lava, the recolonisation of the plants and the constantly changing height and shape of Etna is once again a reminder – like Mount Bromo in Java – that the earth is alive. The Sicilians refer to Etna as “Mother” and believe she has a soul.
Etna dominates Eastern Sicily. More than 25% of Sicily’s population lives on Etna’s slopes, and it is the main source of income for the island, both from agriculture – due to its rich volcanic soil – and tourism. The mountain is surrounded by myth and legend including that of the deadly monster Typhon being trapped under this mountain by Zeus, and the forges of Hephaestus being located underneath it; of Zeus binding another monster Enceladus under Etna, or Athena throwing the whole island of Sicily on top of him; or that Etna is the smithy of the gods where Hephaistos or Vulcan forged weapons for the gods; or that the Cattle of the Sun grazed on the slopes of Mount Etna and killing and eating some of these brought destruction upon Odisseus’s men; or when Hades abducted Persephone, he opened a crevice in Mount Etna as an entrance to the Underworld. Take your pick. Either way, the Sicilians believe that Etna has a soul.
But if Etna has a soul, and the 2002 eruption destroyed the tourist area on Etna Nord, what is Etna saying about visitors to the mountain? Perhaps with one eye on his livelihood, our guide declared that she’s not objecting to visitors per se, but to a lack of respect for the mountain. What constitutes a lack of respect was unclear but given that the mountain was then home to scientific observation centres, innumerable hiking trails, ski-lifts, cable cars, 4×4 vehicles, souvenir shops and restaurants, and that our guide himself heeded the call of nature amongst the trees, I wasn’t sure what was left to disrespect. Perhaps, like Kinabalu, someone had stripped naked for a selfie or let forth some expletives. Although if so, and given that volcanic activity first took place at Etna about 500,000 years ago, that sort of behaviour must have been going on for a hell of a long time.
The more scientific side of things tells us that Mount Etna lies above the convergent plate margin between the African Plate and the Eurasian Plate, and is associated with the subduction of the former under the latter. Plate boundaries are commonly associated with geological events such as earthquakes and the creation of topographic features such as mountains, volcanoes, mid-ocean ridges, and oceanic trenches. A number of theories have been proposed to explain Etna’s location and eruptive history, including rifting processes, a hot spot, and an intersection of structural breaks in the crust. Apparently scientists are still debating which explanation best fits their data, and are using a variety of methods to build a better image of the Earth’s crust below the volcano.
To this layman it seems remarkable that we still don’t understand the forces which shape our planet, and that new theories continue to be proposed. Very little seems to be black and white. Even our guide, with a degree in geology, would challenge some of the accepted wisdom about some of the vents that have occurred on Etna. The very theories of plate tectonics, which we were taught in that A level geography course and accepted as gospel, are relatively new. The theory of continental drift developed only during the first few decades of the 20th century, and the geo-scientific community only accepted plate-tectonic theory after seafloor spreading was validated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Which makes you wonder what on earth preceded those theories?
Given the myths of the Greek Gods it may be better not to know.
Go to Chapter 19: A world awaits