Mount Etna

Where is Mount Etna?

You will find it in: Italy.

Summit: 37.755° N, 14.995° E

The story behind it

Etna sits above a hot, unusually active patch of the Earth's mantle, which keeps feeding lava up through its slopes almost constantly, making it one of the most continuously active volcanoes on the planet. Because eruptions add and remove material from its summit, Etna's exact height changes over time, growing after big eruptions and sometimes collapsing lower after others. Ancient Greek and Roman writers described its eruptions thousands of years ago, and the philosopher Empedocles is said, in legend, to have thrown himself into its crater. Farmers today grow grapes, olives, and pistachios on Etna's lower slopes, since volcanic ash makes the soil fertile, and around a million people live in towns around its base, closer to a major volcano than almost anywhere else. Small eruptions happen so often that locals barely react, though ash sometimes closes the nearby Catania airport for days.

Find it on the globe

Mount Etna is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.