Greece's most beautiful island is low because of the burning stone

The furniture often shakes slightly, the gas escapes from the ground, the ground is higher than the phenomena that occur on the Greek island of Santorini after the magma bag below the island swells.

Santorini, the name of a Greek island of about 80km2 in the Aegean Sea, was formed by a volcanic eruption from 3,600 years ago. Last year people on the Greek island of Santorini regularly witnessed the light-shaking cups and the smell of gases escaping from the ground below. They suspect small seismic episodes are happening because the volcano below the island operates.

Now satellite radar technology has found the culprit causing vibration. A large, silently melting block of rock makes the volume of magma bags below the volcano increase from 10 to 20 million cubic meters, equivalent to 15 times the volume of the Olympic stadium in London, from January / January. 2011 to April 2012. The swelling of the magma bag makes some parts of the island rise from 8 to 14cm, National Geographic reports.

Santorini Island is a remnant of a massive volcanic eruption 36 centuries ago. It lies way
Greece is about 200km to the southeast and is the largest island in Santorini archipelago.

The volcano beneath Santorini Island has been "asleep" for 60 years and recent events are not signs that it is about to erupt, Nomikou Paraskevi, a geologist at the University of Athens in Greece, said.

'That's just a warning from nature that Santorini island is a volcano that is still active, but it's sleeping , ' she said.

Paraskevi said that the seismic activity and the bulge rate of the magma bag all decreased in the past few months - evidence of volcanism will not erupt in the future. It is likely that volcanoes will continue to 'sleep' for several years or decades.

Along with his colleagues, Paraskevi studied geological activity data on Santorini Island and found that, since January 2011, more than 1,000 small earthquakes have occurred and most of them are seismic events that humans can't feel. The group concluded that the surface of Santorini Island was raised slightly by satellite images and receiving devices from the global positioning system.

David Pyle, a volcanic researcher at Oxford University in England, said that after about 20,000 years, the volcano below Santorini sprayed pumice, not lava, once. But in the past five centuries, it has only erupted on a small scale and is not dangerous. The last eruption, which occurred in 1950, produced a small amount of lava that only covered the surface of several tennis courts.

'These eruptions can create an amount of ash that interrupt air operations and provide water, but they are not strong enough for people to evacuate,' Pyle commented.