Unlikely the common beliefs, Mount Etna isn’t a simple shield volcano or stratovolcano, but it is the result of a succession of volcanic buildings (they continue collapsing and moving their eruptive centres) which are still on the move…

…the history of the Good Giant doesn’t end here!!!...Recently the students of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) have discovered the proofs of an event happened about 8.000 years ago: a landslide composed of 35 cubic kilometres of lavic material probably came off from Etna east side. Then, this landslide sank into the Ionian Sea provoking the biggest tsunami of history. Perhaps the colossal landslide took 10 minutes to deposit completely on the sea floor; at the same time, an enormous wall of water raised reaching about 50 metres of height. The anomalous wave, travelling eastward at a speed between 200 and 700 kilometres per hour, swept the coastal villages of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean , the wave then hit Eastern Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria and Israel: On the South, Northern Africa was awash from Tunisia to Egypt.

The causes of the forgotten tsunami go back to a possible earthquake or to a considerably important eruption, which made a great quantity of deposits of lava precipitate to the sea.

The proofs of this event are supplied by a series of submarine studies, a computer analysis of the abyssal deposits and by the presence of the Valle del Bove, which constitutes a real scar (it was partially filled by lavas of the following eruptions) of what happened 8.000 years ago. Through a series of artificial submarine earthquakes made in the same direction from which the landslide came off and precipitated it was possible to obtain the outlines of the deposits slid down and submerged, whose volumes correspond to that enormous mass. By means of computer simulation, the dynamics of the megatsunami has been reconstructed, confirming the configuration of the sea floor analysed with the use of the present bathymetric charts (charts that recompose the submarine topography).

The only witness of the effects of that distant event seems to come from a Neolithic village in Atlit-Yam (Israel) that, according archaeological excavations, was suddenly abandoned: the numerous submarine traces, both due to the elevation of the tides and the deglaciation (for example the discovery of 6.000 abandoned fish), would bring to the hypothesis that the inhabitants of Atlit-Yam tried to fly from that “wall of water” coming from Etna.

Among hypotheses, studies and witnesses, the only certainty is that the Good Giant loved by Sicilian people constitutes a fascinating and mysterious print both in human and scientific history, and in the future it will continue to surprise and enchant scholars and non scholar as well…