A multinational team of scientists studying the geology of Santorini said it had found that before a volcanic eruption eons ago wiped out the Minoan civilization there had been another earlier and bigger blast.
The discovery “is rewriting Santorini’s geological history,” said Paraskevi Nomikou, a lecturer at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s Geology Department and one of the scientists on the mission.
The results of the team’s discovery have been published in the Nature Group journal Communications Earth & Environment and said there was a giant pumice deposit called Archaeos Tuff that covered three islands.
That seemed to indicate that a shallow underwater eruption of Santorini’s prehistoric volcano took place around 520,000 years ago (with a possible deviation of 10,000 years).
The remains of the volcano of Santorini called the Caldera, is one of the major tourist attractions for the island that is one of the world’s most popular and is overrun with visitors in the summer.
The deposit found was six times larger than the pyroclastic flow deposits of the great explosion that occurred during the Late Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago) and contributed to the decline of the Minoan civilization on Crete.
Nomikou told the state-run Athens-Macedonian News Agency the existence of these ash deposits also on land “highlights the importance of deep subsea drilling to reveal all the secrets of island volcanic arcs, especially in densely populated areas such as the Mediterranean.”
As the new data show, the Christiana-Santorini-Kolumbo volcanic field was much more explosive in the distant past than was previously known but it’s not likely there will be another similar eruption shortly.
A combination of deep drilling, large multidisciplinary datasets, laboratory analyses, and a dense network of marine seismic profiles were used to discover the submarine pumice deposit,, the report said.
“The findings from the underwater exploratory drilling are changing the current understanding of the volcanic arc of the southern Aegean,” Nomikou said.
This oceanographic mission, conducted from December 2022 to February 2023, involved 32 scientists from nine countries working in collaboration.
Read more at thenationalherald.com
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