Word: etna
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Rarely could a place have been so inaptly named. High on Mount Etna is a lodge for skiers and hikers called Rifugio Sapienza, or the Wisdom Refuge. Anyone with an ounce of wisdom wouldn't have built it on Europe's highest and most active volcano. Etna began blowing July 13, and last week burning lava came within just yards of the refuge and nearby stores...
...explosions and molten lava have provided spectacular evening entertainment, but they are a real threat to the 6,300 people who live in Nicolosi, a town at 2,300 ft. So far, the lava has stopped about 2.5 miles away. Those who live on Etna seem to like the excitement. "We have a love affair with this volcano and this mountain," says Nicolosi Mayor Salvatore Moschetto. "Even in the past, when eruptions have ruined some property, we just start over again...
...Etna will too. It rumbles and smokes regularly but is a relatively friendly volcano, giving plenty of warning when it's about to blow. The damage, however, can still be severe. Since the start of this year's eruption, lava has destroyed a ski lift and a couple of summer homes, and threatened Rifugio Sapienza. Don't try to ski there next winter: the slopes will remain too warm to hold enough snow...
...been better equipped to paint still life. (Actually, he's not unlike the cat in his own seafood paintings, fastidiously stalking, with bright-eyed attention, something that cannot move but can go stale.) Everything comes to matter under his level scrutiny. A pyramid of red strawberries becomes a blazing Etna. The surface of a plum turns into a small adventure in discrimination as he gives you the white powder on the purply-black skin and the sharper white highlights reflecting from its gloss, and challenges you to follow the means by which he conveyed both...
There is hope, though, that forecasts will improve. In Nature, geophysicist Hazel Rymer and colleagues at England's Open University reported a possible sign of an impending eruption: shifts in gravity. They found that the gravitational field around Italy's Mount Etna increased sharply six months before it spewed forth in December...