The big volcano is very dynamic, always engaged in a closely monitored – but not entirely predictable – “dance” of destruction, construction, collapse, erosion and “quieter periods”.
The cloud-dance on Etna’s upper slopes is even more quickly-shifting – variously, arriving, departing, thinning, thickening, “setting in”, and “burning off”/“dissolving”.
Just a couple of minutes earlier – when I took the previous post’s photos – we were yet to enjoy more than fleeting glimpses of small parts of this post’s crater-scape.
At 11.42 am on 30 September 2023 it suddenly became fully-visible.
You are not looking at Etna’s summit.
The pictured crater/crater complex is just one of an inconstant number of same.
(photo ©️ Doug Spencer, taken circa 2900-3000 metres ASL, on upper south face of Mt Etna. Its wide-angle – 24mm – field of view enables you to see a lot, but it “shortens/flattens” the depth of the craters and the height of their walls. Anything that was more than 20 metres distant from my vantage point is decidedly bigger, in real life, than it appears to be, in the picture)
The remaining Etna posts will present closer views.