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On shaky ground TEXT
Svenja Beller and Julia Lauter
Massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are anticipated in parts of southern Europe. Millions of lives are at risk. Although the data speaks for itself, experts struggle to get their warnings heard and heeded. The same fate looms for the residents of three major European cities – Naples, Lisbon and Istanbul. Thousands of them will be buried alive, leaving the survivors severely traumatized. Their cities will be devastated by an earthquake or volcanic eruption. The current residents may be long dead by the time disaster strikes. But their death knell could also ring tomorrow. Our superterranean world rests on huge continental plates floating on a viscous layer. When the plates become wedged together, danger is never far away. To understand what happens then, we can simply snap our fingers: we increase the pressure between our thumb and middle finger until the latter gives way. The same occurs with the plates deep below the earth’s surface. Except that this “snap” unleashes enough energy to take everything above with it. Houses, offices, schools, factories, power plants, bridges, hospitals – simply everything. The greatest danger to Europe lies at its southern perimeter, where the Eurasian plate meets the African plate and the Anatolian plate pushes in from the east. Millions populate this area – in cities like Naples, Lisbon and Istanbul. How do the authorities go about protecting residents from the impending disaster? Naples Mount Vesuvius is one possible cause of Naples’ future destruction. “If it erupted tomorrow, there would be no strategy to save the people,” says Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo, a volcanolo gist at the Osservatorio Vesuviano. Beneath the volcano, the African continental plate is sliding in under its Eurasian counterpart and melting. At some point it will shoot up as magma through the crater. But nobody knows when. And guesswork won’t help anyone sleep better. For decades, seismologists had hoped to identify common precursors that would allow clear predictions of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. They drew a blank. So far, statistics are all they have to go on, and using them to
calculate large intervals is scarcely reliable. And mistakes have consequences. If the scientists jump the gun, they can expect chaos and hugely expensive evacuations. If their warn ings come too late, they risk countless fatalities. For this reason, most experts keep their cards close to their chest. Mastrolorenzo is the exception with his plain speaking. He, too, can only guess at the date of the next major eruption, but he knows it is on the way. “What happened in the past will continue to happen in the future,” he asserts. Just like 4,000 years ago, when Vesuvius wiped out everything in the region and the remaining layer of ash made human life impossible for 230 years. And as was also the case 1,900 years later, when an eruption destroyed Pompeii and killed thousands. Today, more than three million people live in the volcano’s vicinity. Until 1995, not even an emergency plan had been prepared for them. And it was only in 2001 that the civil defense agency designated an area where residents were permanently on standby. This so-called “red zone” was expanded in 2014. The 700,000 occupants inside its perimeters would be in severe jeopardy in the event of an eruption. If one appears imminent, the authorities plan to bus them to safety within 72 hours. Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo considers this unrealistic, partly because the plan is tai lored to a relatively small event. “There is no scientific justification for this,” says the volcano logist. Volcanoes can simply erupt without warning. The 72-hour evacuation window is more fantasy than certainty. And that isn’t even Naples’ biggest headache: in the west of the city, the Phlegrean (ancient Greek: burning) Fields, a slumbering supervolcano, rage underground. “Danger is part of our identity,” says Giuseppe Di Roberto, one of the many residents of its huge crater. On three occasions – 15,000, 29,000 and 39,000 years ago – the Phlegrean Fields exploded with between ten and eighty times the force that Vesuvius can muster. The eruptions buried the entire region, and the ash particles in the atmosphere triggered a volcanic winter in large parts of the planet – which lasted for years and may have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. If a repeat of this magnitude
