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AEOLIAN ISLANDS
Ploughing Through the aeolian sea
One proceeds through a confusion of colour, between scenery of incomparable beauty and contrasting character. Islands of wild aspect and sombre coloured coasts, which fall sheer into the sea, offering visions of horrifying beauty, giving way to islands of soft configuration and with verdant slopes; vast sterile, bleak areas extend alongside fertile, pleasant gardens; rust coloured mountains alternating with those white as snow; vast black beaches like ebany contrasting with light coloured shores; inaccessible and winding coasts follow in antetheses to low and hospitable rivieras; bold shaped islets, vigorously outlined against the sky, rise beside others flat and slightly undulating.
In addition to similar contrasts, characteristic peculiarities render the whole archipelago original and interesting: rocks where Nature has been satisfied to create strange perforated rocks resembling bold bridges and rampant arches; dykes which extend like agile spires and obelisks; azure, Parthenopean type grottos; picturesque inlets with quiet recesses: tortuous, narrow valleys with high vertical walls; enourmous rock gardens, cyclopic bulwarks which, falling sheer, offer scenery worthy of the fantastic creation of Dorè; areas of sea in ebullition (due to underwater fumaroles); extensive regions clothed in all the colours of the rainbow (due to the exhalations of underwater fumaroles); rocks with a network of clefts from which boiling water gushes; wild shaped hills issuing lava and projecting lapilli and incandescent scoriae; steep slopes ploughed through by torrents of fire.
He who wanders in the kingdom of Eolo and Vulcano, has the sensation of having fallen, as by enchantment, into a vague land which corresponds only with the world created by the phantasy of Dante and Ariosto.
A geological Synthesis
The Aeolian Archipelago from the tectonic point of view, derives from the ditching of the Tyrrhenian Sea in the Pliocene. This event corresponds to the final stage of the Appennines orogenesis along its internal edge. The following stage allowed a deep magma to run up through leaks which gave origin to the Aeolian volcanism.
This volcanic system rests on the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea, whose depth varies from 1000 to 3000 meters It was thought in the Past that the volcanism of the Aeolian Islands had started in the Miocene or in the latter Pliocene: recently some researches, while studying the sea terraces due to the eustatic movements of the Mediterranean, could prove that this volcanism goes back to a more recent age, probably less than a million years ago and, that is, to the Pleistocene.
It has been established that at an earlier stage there took shape the islands of Panarea, Filicudi and Alicudi and part of the apparatuses of Salina and Lipari. In a later phase, in the early Pleistocene, the completion of Lipari and Salina and the formation of Vulcano and Stromboli, took place. Radiometric datations on carbonized vegetables made it possible to establish three periods of activity.
In the first period (between 330 and 160 thousand years) the volcanic buildings of Panarea and the dome of Capo Graziano took shapel in the second (between 160 and 130 thousand years) corresponding to the main phase of activity, there took shape: Mount Chirica at Lipari; at Salina Mount Rivi, Capo and Pizzo Corvo; at Filicudi the Fossa delle Felci, at Alicudi the Montagnola; in the third period (between 130 thousand years up to the present days) there took shape at Lipari, Mounts S. Angelo, Guardia and Pelato; at Salina, Fossa delle Felci, Monte dei Porri, Pollara; at Filicudi, Montagnola and il Torrione; at Alicudi acid lava expansions toolk place.
The island of Panarea is the oldest apparatus of the Archipelago. Vulcano rises at 100 thousand years with subsequent formations of stratum volcanoes to the South, of Caldera, Fossa and Vulcanello. Stromboli starts its activity (at 40 thousand years) with Vancori; subsequently the Cima took shape and at last the present crater.
The Aeolian volcanism is characterized by an evolution of the nature of magma.
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