Watch this dramatic footage of Sicily's Mount Etna erupting
Europe's tallest active volcano erupts after dormancy of two years
On Thursday Sicily's and Europe's tallest mountain and volcanic peak Mount Etna erupted into a giant plume of ash and smoke. This was the first eruption in two years to reach the surface of Etna's Voragine crater. And according to scientists amongst the most violent in the past two decades. The National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology reported that it threw up an ash column some 7 km high.
The video above made up of stills and timelapses was shot by Sicilian photographer Marco Restivo. "Marco used photo editing software to overlap five images to create one single picture which shows volcano lightning under a cloud of dense smoke", the video describes Restivo's editing technique of capturing volcanic lightening, an extremely hard phenomenon to catch on camera. It usually occurs only in the most intense eruptions, and is often confined to the
