Word: etna
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Typical of the anger and frustration prevailing in Italy's impoverished south was the situation in Catania, an industrial city at the foot of Mount Etna. Projected only a few years ago as the Milan of the south, the city today is overwhelmed by seemingly unsolvable credit difficulties. Voters there gave the neo-Fascists an impressive 21.5% of the vote. "It was a corrivo," said a worker. The word means "a boom of rage...
...Magma. Etna's fireworks have provided Europeans with one of the most exciting spectacles in years, and tourists flooded to the region. There were also more serious visitors: the numerous volcanologists and other earth scientists who are clambering over Etna's slopes, hoping to learn more about the processes at work inside the mountain. Most volcanoes lie near the meeting place of the massive, slow-moving plates that are believed to make up the earth's outer shell. Their crunching movements apparently cause cracks in the earth's crust that enable hot material known as magma...
Although the increased emission of gases from Etna in recent years gave scientists some hint of impending trouble, they are still unable to predict eruptions with any accuracy. As a result, they concentrate on trying to minimize damage once the lava flows. Belgian Volcanologist Haroun Tazieff, whose asbestos-suited sorties into fuming craters round the globe have earned him the sobriquet "The Inferno Detective," has suggested bombing Etna to test methods for diverting the lava flow from villages. The Italians shrugged off the idea. It could raise a Solomonic question: Whose land should be spared and whose should be ruined...
Dantesque Scene. Such problems are hardly new. Famed among the ancients as the forge of the fire god Vulcan, Etna has acted up throughout recorded history. During medieval times, its lava completely destroyed the city of Catania. The latest series of rumblings-the most dramatic in two decades and the eleventh of the century-began in the late afternoon of April 5. In a Dantesque scene, gases, glowing cinders, red-hot boulders and seething lava (temperature: about 2,000° F.) spewed out of newly opened boccas, or mouths, on Etna's upper slopes. Hot tongues of lava engulfed...
Scores of reporters and cameramen have arrived to record the geological drama. In one memorable scene, TV cameras caught a highway bridge on Etna's panoramic Sea and Snow drive being twisted and melted by encroaching lava. The eruptions have also created a carnival-like atmosphere; a few of the tourists have gone so far as to cheer whenever the lava pours into a fresh field or orchard. That behavior has threatened another kind of blowup: fighting between insensitive sightseers and angered Sicilian farmers...