Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano, is delighting tourists and locals by blowing almost perfect circles of smoke into the blue skies over Sicily.
The smoke circles, known as volcanic vortex rings, are actually made of condensed gases and water vapour. They form when gases rise up from deep below the earth and escape inside the crater of a volcano.
Mount Etna is one of a handful of volcanoes around the world that produces the rings, and does so prolifically, but the latest emissions are exceptional, scientists say.
“No volcano on earth produces so many rings of steam as Etna. We have known this for quite some time. But now it is beating all previous records,” said Boris Behncke, a volcanologist at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology of Catania. He has been studying the volcano and living close to it for the past 25 years.