Mount Etna: 5 facts about Europe's most active volcano
Italy's Mount Etna lays claim to several titles. It is:
Mount Etna rises 3,357 meters (11,014 feet) above Catania, a city on the east coast of Sicily, Italy.
It covers an area of 1,250 square kilometers (482 square miles).
Mount Etna is what geologists and volcanologists call a stratovolcano or composite volcano.
Stratovolcanoes typically have steep inclines and many separate vents, formed over tens to hundreds of thousands of years.
According to Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), Etna has more than 500,000 years of eruptive history, but it's only taken its current, conical shape in the past hundred thousand years.
Stratovolcanoes can be highly explosive when they erupt. They spew a variety of magma types, including basalt, andesite, dacite, and rhyolite.
When UNESCO inscribed Mount Etna as a World Heritage Site in 2013, it said it was "an iconic........
© Deutsche Welle
