LAVA channels created when Mount Etna blew its top in 2001 have prompted volcanologists to rethink the way volcanoes sculpt the Earth.
When a volcano erupts, lava flows etch channels in the mountainside several metres deep by melting the rock and simply washing it away – or so it was thought. But Jens Siewert and Carmelo Ferlito at the University of Catania, Italy, actually watched a channel forming during Etna’s 2001 eruption, and they think the molten lava behaved more like a glacier, eroding the rock in its path.
Because the lava took only 12 hours to form a channel 220…
