#kolumbo

The Lagniappe Sessions :: Kolumbo

“If Kolumbo lights up, we’re done for, child,” distinguished marine geologist Evi Nomikou remembers her grandfather – a farmer from Vothonas – warning, speaking of the danger lurking in the underwater volcano cluster off the coast of Santorini, even back when she was in elementary school in the 1980s.

“To this day, some people continue to confuse it with the Nea Kameni volcano in the caldera, which is terrestrial. The last time Kolumbo erupted – at least in a way that was visible to the naked eye – was in 1650, spewing toxic gases that killed dozens of residents and hundreds of animals, and causing a tsunami. It was an incident that became deeply ingrained in local memory and was passed down from generation to generation, until it reached my grandfather and then me,” she tells Kathimerini.

On a recent November morning, Giannis Bellonias was sipping tsipouro on the veranda of his cave house in Santorini, Greece. “Visibility is poor today. Hope Kolumbo won’t give scientists a hard time,” Bellonias said to his wife, looking out onto the Aegean sea. The alabaster paths leading down to Santorini’s famous sun-bleached, blue-shuttered cave houses, spread out below. Kolumbo is a gigantic, active submarine volcano located roughly four miles to the northeast of Santorini and 550 yards underwater. When it last erupted in 1650 AD, it formed a crater 1.5 miles wide, triggered a tsunami that smashed into the eastern and southern coast of Santorini, and killed over 50 people. Bellonias, who has lived on and off the island for almost 60 years and owns a cultural center and library called the Bellonio Foundation, is keenly aware of the threat Kolumbo poses, and believes it is more dangerous than that of the two volcanoes that sit in the middle of the Santorini caldera, Palea Kameni (“Old Burnt,” inactive) and Nea Kameni (“New Burnt,” still active). Experts think he might be onto something. As Bellionas looked out onto the sea, scientists dropped new seismographs into Kolumbo’s crater in hopes of keeping a closer eye on the mysterious beast. “Trust me, I’ve dived into the Kolumbo crater with submersible and have seen the active hydrothermal field of the volcano with my bare eyes,” says Paraskevi Nomikou, a geologist-oceanographer at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens who dove into the submarine volcano in October. “We need to monitor this active submarine volcano with the same urgency we grant to on-land volcanoes.”

A team of international scientists researching the submerged Kolumbo volcano off Santorini discovered unknown hydrothermal fountains, or “chimneys,” around which bacterial communities are flourishing.

The oceanographic research mission, consisting of 30 scientists from the United States, Greece, Australia and Germany, is funded and supported by NASA.

The scientists tested new “intelligent” technologies with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which in the future can be used to explore alien oceans on distant satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, such as Enceladus and Europe, where submarine traces of life will be sought in extreme and potentially dangerous environments.

Researchers were satisfied with the ability of robotic underwater vehicles to receive orders and then successfully execute them autonomously in an unknown environment such as that of Kolumbo.