For RSI, the Italian-speaking Swiss public TV station, we have no escape: an eruption at the Campi Flegrei it will also destroy Naples, covering it under thirty meters (sic!) of volcanic material; it will cause serious problems throughout Southern Italy and will have important repercussions on a large part of the European continent. For a few days now, a documentary from the Swiss television channel has been circulating on YouTube with an extremely explicit title: “Naples, the supervolcano that threatens Europe”. A 42 minute and 24 second reportage that will make anyone who watches it tremble. Starting from the animated reconstructions that show Piazza del Plebiscito reached and submerged by burning clouds, the Church of San Francesco da Paola destroyed with flames coming out of the large windows, the two equestrian statues knocked down; finally an overall vision with a Naples completely submerged by a blanket of heavy ash and in the background, spared from the catastrophe, the sole hill of San Martino, a post-atomic landscape.
Destruction scenarios
But it’s not just the images of (more or less imaginative) reconstructions that disturb viewers. What leaves us dumbfounded and worried are some of the alarming declarations of the scholars interviewed: there is talk of scenarios of almost total destruction, the antipodes of the type of eruption hypothesized by the scientists who worked for the national civil protection in the preparation of the Evacuation plan. The latter is based on the probabilistic hypothesis of a type of medium-sized eruption, defined as subplinian, (explosive eruptions with phenomenologies similar to those of Plinian eruptions, but of lower energy and consequent reduced areal dispersion of the erupted products).
«Inevitable cataclysm»
Yet during the program you can hear sentences like this: «A threat looms over Naples, a danger that scares Europe, some scientists believe that the Campi Flegrei are responsible for the disappearance of the Neanderthal man, 40 thousand years later there are signs of awakening, catastrophe could occur at any moment.” And again: «The Campi Flegrei volcano now contains so much lava and so much pressure that the cataclysm is inevitable and begins at the Solfatara». Volcanologist Patrick Allard says: «We would see eruptive columns rising several tens of kilometers, at least up to the stratosphere. The ash falls on Naples, even further away, there are victims and great destruction.”
The Cambridge scholar
And Amy Donovan, professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge, adds: “At that point the city would have to be deserted because the air would be saturated with ash, pyroclastic material and volcanic residues of all kinds.” And again, the voice of the journalist off-screen comments: «Naples disappears under thirty meters of volcanic material». Then, almost as if she wanted to justify such a devastating scenario: “The image is disconcerting but scientifically possible.” The animation frame follows which shows the city now covered by a blanket of reddish-grey ash with the sole exception of the San Martino hill.
The volcanologist of Perugia
But perhaps the most chilling intervention is that of Diego Perugini, director of the Physics and Geology department of the University of Perugia. The scientist recalls the existence of two magma reservoirs under the Campi Flegrei: the shallower between 4 and 5 km and the deeper, larger one, between 10 and 15 km. Generally before eruptions the two magmas “mix”. Perugini explains that his team is working on an important question: how much time will people have before the actual eruption? Answer: «Studying the material erupted in the past we read that at least two magmas met inside the earth’s crust and began to mix. We have recreated the process in the laboratory and from what we can estimate, from the beginning of the mixing of the magmas to the eruption the times are very short, on the order of tens of minutes.” The off-screen voice concludes: «Thirty minutes is a short time to evacuate a city». And there seems to be little else to add.
