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Just south of Ternate, Tidore Island is also just “a dot on the map”, and was likewise “built” by its volcano.
Ternate Island and Tidore Island were once the centres of two rival sultanates.
Tidore’s big volcano – Mt Kie Matubu – dominates this post’s photo, which I took from Ternate’s eastern (Ternate City) shore.
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On Ternate the third afternoon of October 2024 was very wet – a not unusual circumstance on an island where annual average rainfall comfortably exceeds 2,000 mm.
At 3.46 pm the rain was easing, as we stood on the rim of Tolire Lake.
We failed to see any of its resident crocodiles, but the view across the crater lake – and up to Mt Gamalama’s highest peak – was becoming progressively clearer.
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As you can see, the total absence of clouds “up there” proved fleeting.
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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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Construction of a cableway on Mount Etna began in the 1950s.
The first version began operations in 1966.
Etna first “intervened” in 1971, destroying the cableway’s upper section.
Various other eruptions have since wreaked varying degrees of destruction, resulting in repeated closures, rebuilds and realignments.
Since the spring of 2023, the cableway and its (new) cable cars have been as they appear in my photo.
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Today’s image finds us still in “our” bus.
In relation to yesterday’s post, we were another six minutes further up Etna’s southern flank.
When I took the photo it was 10. 05 am on 30 September 2023, and we were probably circa 1300 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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