Hidden under a lake, an ancient and gigantic volcano awakens in the heart of Europe

The region halfway between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, known as the Eifel, lies on a gigantic volcano it last erupted 11,000 years ago, but could come to life.

The first signal came last June. So him “Geophysical Journal International” published a report in which it was assured that there were sufficient indications to consider that the region could experience a growth in its volcanic activity strong enough to cause in the future an eruption.

New investigations have now resulted in scientists warning of seismic activities grow up and gas leaks in the region of Lake Laach, a lake created precisely by an eruption thousands of years ago. The Laach, located very close to the German city of Koblenz, was the crater of a volcano that while sinking, it was filled with water.

This new research confirmed what had already been published in June, namely that in this region, the Earth would take years to rise at a speed of one millimeter per year, ten times faster than what could be considered. as normal. This rise is due to the fact that there are hot rocks that push the mantle towards the surface, “a key ingredient in volcanism”, according to the researchers.

The volcanoes of Europe

Continental Europe has virtually no active volcanoes, except in southern Italy. The rest of the active European volcanoes they are on islands like Iceland or in territories of European sovereignty but far from the old continent, like the Canary Islands (more than 1000 kilometers from Europe and less than 100 from Africa) or the French islands in the Pacific.

The study on the Eifel region ensures that the rate at which the earth rises, this millimeter per year, “is, in geological terms, huge”. The region had its last volcanic eruptions over 11,000 years ago and scientists now believe that these explosions were very powerful and changed the orography of the region. create multiple lakes, including the Laach. They compare these eruptions to that of the Philippine volcano Pinatubo, which in 1991 released 5,000 million cubic meters of ash and dust into the atmosphere.

Eruptions from the region’s volcanoes carried ash to northern Sweden, the west of the French Atlantic coast, and southern Italy, as its column of ash reached up to the 30 kilometers high, three times the altitude at which a commercial aircraft flies.

Scientists also explain that the region’s volcanism is special because its volcanoes were not formed, like most of the planet, by the meeting between two tectonic plates.

They were formed by the existence of a “hot spot”, a place where incandescent liquid lava rises to the surface of the Earth’s mantle. In the middle of a plate. A little further south, on the banks of the Rihn, there are geysers that expel jets of water with a very high CO2 composition every two hours.

The Eifel region is a stone’s throw from one of the areas with more population density of the European continent. An explosive-type eruption like that of Pinatubo would affect the German Rhineland, southern Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Another danger, even without a rash, is that movements below the surface cause earthquakes strong enough to cause material and human damage. In historical records, there are earthquakes in the region above 6 degrees on the Richter scale.

Brussels, special

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