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 Santorini native, Nomikou gives credence to local “folk wisdom”: Nea Kameni can cover the island in ash and destroy crops, but it’s Kolumbo that they should fear.
This month, the sudden eruption of New Zealand’s White Island volcano created a 3.7-kilometer-high column of ash and killed at least eight people, raising fresh concerns about the safety of volcano tourism. The 1.5 million tourists who wash up on Santorini’s shores each year may not realize it, but they, like the island’s roughly 15,000 permanent residents, dance with a constant volcanic threat.