Three underwater volcanoes discovered off Sicily by Maltese, Italian research expedition

Three large underwater volcanoes were discovered off Sicily’s south-western coast by Maltese and Italian researchers scouring the seabed between Mazara del Vallo and Sciacca.

The volcanoes are at least six kilometres wide and rise more than 150m from the seafloor, Sicilian regional newspaper La Sicilia reported.

The expedition on board the Meteor, a German research vessel, was a collaboration between the University of Malta and the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS) of Trieste.

The new volcanoes form part of a series of submerged volcanoes, which were discovered in the same area in 2019. Researchers collected rock samples, including lava deposits, to be analysed in the coming months.

The rock studies will shed light on the volcanoes’ ages and magma characteristics.

The scanning of previously unexplored seabed along the Sicily Channel took place between 16 July and 5 August.

Researcher also discovered the wreck of a 100m long and 17m wide ship at a depth of 110m on the Nameless Bank (Banco Senza Nome) to the east of the Italian island of Pantelleria.

Other researchers who took part in the expedition came from Germany’s Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, the US’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, the universities of Birmingham, Oxford and Edinburgh in the UK, and Kiel University in Germany.