Ah Santorini! Famous as perhaps the most spectacular of the Greek islands, for the most beautiful sunsets in the Aegean, for the archeological remains at the Minoan site of Akrotiri. Santorini – host to a volcanic explosion so immense that 61 km3 of magma and rock were blown away, likely giving birth to the legend of Atlantis. All that was left of the island was an immense caldera, about 10km x 20km across, with only the steep circular rim of the old Santorini emerging from the Aegean.
But since this explosion of ~1645 – 1600 BCE (1628 BCE if you believe tree ring data from the Mediterranean), Santorini is slowly slowly rebuilding itself. The volcano is situated above a subduction zone (the African Plate submerging below the European Plate) which aids in the on-going generation of magma: Santorini is an active volcano, albeit sluggish compared to Aetna or Kilauea.
This extremely detailed map of the Santorini Caldera documents the “newest” addtions to Santorini, the Kameni Islands. This map was created combining airborne remote sensing data (thanks to NERC) and bathymetry data collected by shipboard multibeam echosounders. The resultant high resolution map is capable of distinguishing individual lava flows, establishing relative dating between them, and determining the volume of extruded magma. The morphology of lava flow aids in estimation of their composition: the more silica within a lava, the more “humpy” in appearance; increasing silica contents through a volcanic series could presage the advent of a new volcanic eruption. Increasing silica contents combined with increasing water content could predict another immense explosive eruption.
The Kameni Islands emerged from the depths of the Santorini Caldera in ~ AD 46 (Old Kameni) and AD 1707 (New Kameni). Photographs document minor eruptions that occurred between 1925 – 1928. Between January 2011 and April 2012, a short period of volcanic “unrest” was shown by increased seismicity and inflation of the caldera. “Kameni” by the way, means “burnt” in Greek, so these are the Burnt Islands – composed largely of scoria, these islands do look like the burnt remnants of the Earth.
The study concludes that it has taken ~3200 years for the Kamini Islands to grow to their present rather small size. At an average extrusion rate of ~ 1 million cubic meters/year, it would take ~60 thousand years for the Kameni activity to re-fill the Santorini caldera.
In the meantime, there will be plenty of glorious sunsets to observe while sipping the mellow wine of Santorini and contemplating the astounding volcanic history of the island.
Image: Bathmetric and topographic map of Santorini Caldera with 14m grid resolution. The Kameni Islands are in the center of the caldera by Nomikou et al, 2014. Read their paper on-line at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214242814000047# The emergence and growth of a submarine volcano: The Kameni islands, Santorini (Greece), 2014. P. Nomikou, M.M. Parks, D. Papanikolaou, D.M. Pyle, T.A. Mather, S. Carey, A.B. Watts, M. Paulatto, M.L. Kalnins, I. Livanos, K. Bejelou, E. Simou, and I. Perros
I always recommend my favorite book on Santorini: Unearthing Atlantis: An Archaeological Odyssey to the Fabled Lost Civilization by Charles R. Pellegrino
