American Museum of Natural History

Scientists in Sicily are collecting an enormous amount of data to monitor moving magma inside Mt. Etna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Nearly a million people live on the volcano's flanks, so being able to predict an eruption could be a matter of life and death. In this Earth Bulletin, visit the volcano's snowy slopes and learn how scientists from the Italian National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology record seismic activity, measure gases seeping up through the ground, sense the volcano's temperature changes, and assess disturbances in gravitational and magnetic fields to predict eruptions weeks ahead of time.