Mount Etna’s Spectacular Monday Eruption Marks the Volcano’s Most Intense Activity in Years
The explosion was the strongest since 2021, expelling ash, dust, lava and a pyroclastic flow, but no injuries or deaths were reported
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Since Mount Etna’s dramatic eruption on Monday, videos depicting tourists fleeing from billowing clouds of smoke have spread across social media—perhaps faster than the volcanic material that spilled from the peak that day.
The now-viral eruption culminated in an explosion of gas, debris, fountains of lava and a pyroclastic flow that swept across around 1.2 miles from the volcano’s southwestern crater, according to the Associated Press’ Colleen Barry.
“The amount of ash raining down was really intense,” Mirko Messina of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Italy, says in a video from the Associated Press. “I started coughing for a couple of hours.”
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No one reported any injuries or deaths, and no evacuations were required.
That’s despite the fact that pyroclastic flows—ground-level, fast-moving clouds of extremely hot gas and volcanic fragments—are one of the most dangerous results of volcanic eruptions. In fact, when Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 C.E., its pyroclastic flow was one of the deadliest volcanic features in the devastation of Pompeii and Herculaneum. During Mount Etna’s recent eruption, however, the flow was contained within the region’s Lion Valley, per the AP.
BREAKING: Insane videos emerge after Italy’s Mt. Etna erupts.
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) June 2, 2025
People are sent running lava flows pour toward them. Luckily no reports of deaths or injuries have been made thus far.
Mount Etna is Europe’s most active volcano located on the island of Sicily, Italy,
The… pic.twitter.com/4Z3VuKepkB
Mount Etna, located on the Italian island of Sicily, is the largest active volcano in Europe and the world’s most active stratovolcano—cone-shaped volcanoes with steep sides that commonly produce explosive eruptions because of their thick, sticky lava. The recent blast marks Mount Etna’s most intense activity since February 2021, Stefano Branca, managing director of INGV’s Etnean observatory in Catania, Sicily, tells Mimmo Trovato of the Italian news agency Ansa. Another eruption occurred in February this year, and the volcano had experienced several periods of activity since.
The explosion on Monday was “strombolian,” per a statement by INGV. Strombolian eruptions are characterized by moderate, intermittent and firework-like bursts, and they take their name from the Italian island of Stromboli, nicknamed the “lighthouse of the Mediterranean” because of its highly active volcano.
Monday’s event saw “a level of danger limited to the summit area of Etna, whose access was preventatively closed to tourists and the curious,” Branca says to Ansa in Italian, translated by Smithsonian magazine. Mount Etna attracts more than one million visitors per year, and authorities in Sicily have recently been grappling with reckless tourists who want a close look at the eruptions, according to the New York Times’ Nia Decaille.
But this week’s event caught tourists by surprise. Nicholas DiLeonardi and Michelle Nigro-DiLeonardi, two newlyweds from New York City, found themselves on Mount Etna during the blast, reports ABC News’ Yi-Jun Yu. “When we were up there, I was like, ‘OK, if this is another Pompeii, at least we’re together,’” DiLeonardi tells the publication.
Etna’s explosion on Monday, which ended that same day, marks the most recent episode in the volcano’s 500,000-year eruptive history, and at least 2,700 years of that activity are recorded.
