Category: Americas and Eurasia and Africa

 

 

This chapter’s images were taken circa two minutes later than were the previous post’s.

Here, the photos’ sense of height, scale and distance is pretty close to how a naked-eyed human would perceive them.

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The big volcano is very dynamic, always engaged in a closely monitored – but not entirely predictable – “dance” of destruction, construction, collapse, erosion and “quieter periods”.

The cloud-dance on Etna’s upper slopes is even more quickly-shifting – variously, arriving, departing, thinning, thickening, “setting in”, and “burning off”/“dissolving”.

Just a couple of minutes earlier – when I took the previous post’s photos – we were yet to enjoy more than fleeting glimpses of small parts of this post’s crater-scape.

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This post’s photos were taken 15-20 minutes after the previous chapter’s.

We had walked up a little higher, staying on a marked path.

For several minutes, most of upper Etna had been invisible to us, but the clouds which had fully-enshrouded us were now fracturing, lifting, starting to “dissolve”.

At 11.40 am we were probably standing a whisker below 3000 metres above sea level; the pictured, freer-roaming folks were, variously, a little higher up or lower down.

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…well, members of a closely-related species…which is also sometimes seen on volcanoes, thousands of metres above sea level.

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This post’s photos were taken just moments after the previous one’s; the very same lava flow was the relevant “destroyer”.

Both images show the same structure, in which humans had lived.

Q1: how many people died as a result of that lava flow?

Q2: how many humans has Europe’s biggest currently-active volcano directly killed during “recorded history”?

(I.e. since circa 1500 BC – a little more than 3, 500 years ago. Etna was already active for circa half a million years before humans began to “monitor” it)

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This post’s photos were taken 11-12 minutes after the previous chapter’s…and further up on Etna’s southern slopes.

I think the relevant lava flows would have occurred during the 2002-3 eruption, which also destroyed most of a ski field’s infrastructure on Etna’s northern side.

Some humans venerate volcanoes, but lava flows pay no heed to a building’s “sacred” or “secular” intent.

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We begin this series’ “on the volcano itself” section at its low point – in terms of altitude and photographic standards.

The featured image looks through the window of the bus.

At 9.44 am on the last September day of  2023, Catania’s metropolitan sprawl was now just behind and below us, whilst Etna utterly dominated our view ahead…and above.

If you look carefully, this post’s photos will give you a sense of how equally potent are Etna’s “destructive” and “creative”aspects.

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The featured image’s vantage point is the grounds of the castle for which the relevant hilltop village is named.

Castelmola is directly behind Taormina, and very steeply above it.

The eastern shoreline of Sicily sits circa 530 metres lower than did my camera at 7.20 pm on 02 October 2023,

Deploying a wide angle lens enabled me to “capture” a deal of the jawdropping view we were enjoying, albeit at a cost – my image “flattens” rather than flatters Etna.

Its summit is more than 2,800 metres higher than Castelmola’s.

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We spent the afternoon of 01 October 2023 in a Sicilian village, a little northeast of Etna.

Spectacularly sited atop a steep hill, Motta Camastra is celebrated for its oft-huge, very tasty walnuts; they are sometimes marketed as “Etna walnuts”.

Having just attended the village’s annual walnut festival, we were walking to the bus which would take us back to the valley below.

At 6.19 pm, sunset on Sicily’s east coast – circa 20 kilometres distant – was 25 minutes away…

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