A geological study has recently established that the lava that spews out of Mount Etna is generated from what is known as the Malta Escarpment, a system of seismogenic faults that has often also caused earthquakes in the Mediterranean area.

The study was carried out by the Geophysics and Vulcanology National Institute of Italy, Italian universities and the German centre for geosciences based in Potsdam. The results were published by the Earth & Planetary Science Letters magazine.

Computer simulations indicate the movement of the lava beneath the earth surface. Initially it had been believed that Etna’s lava was a vertical climb of the molten rock, but this recent study has established that it does not come from directly beneath the mountain, but originates from an area beneath the sea in between Sicily and Malta, what is known as the Malta Escarpment.

In long gone years, the lava also used to feed the Hyblaean Mountains, a mountain range in south-eastern Sicily, Italy straddling the provinces of Ragusa, Syracuse and Catania. The volcanoes here are now extinct.

The Malta Escarpment is a system of seismogenic faults that is found off the eastern coast of Sicily, in the Ionian Sea, right in between Sicily and Malta. The system is 300 kilometres long, at a depth of 3,000 metres, starting off Sicily and extending beyond Malta to the east.

The Malta Escarpment had been the cause of the massive 7.4 Richter magnitude earthquake that had hit the area on 11 January 1693. This is the most violent earthquake that hit Italy in the last 1,000 years; it had killed 60,000 people and had been accompanied by a tsunami. The earthquake had also been felt in Malta, and had also destroyed the Mdina Cathedral.