WHY do some volcanoes fizz and pop without erupting? The answer, it seems, lies deep beneath the volcano.
Stromboli in Italy has been spewing 200-metre-high jets of lava for several thousand years. “It’s not dangerous – it’s very beautiful,” says Patrick Allard at the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Catania, Italy.
He and his team studied the composition of gases in the jets by firing infrared light at them and examining the spectra of light emitted. They combined this with models of the volcano and realised the jets were coming from gas bubbles near the volcano floor, 3 kilometres…
