An Italian Volcano Turned Out to Be a Fraud
“There’s just no evidence we can see that this was ever a volcano.”
Janine Krippner was the first to notice something amiss with the volcano.
A volcanologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, Krippner was doing a routine fact-check in the program’s volcano registry, scrolling through photos of all kinds of volcanoes—from sleeping geological giants to actively raging mountains—while checking the accuracy of their captions. When she stumbled across the page for Larderello, a volcano in Italy’s picturesque Tuscany region, she was naturally expecting to see a volcano. Instead, she was presented with a bizarre shot of several industrial cooling towers associated with a geothermal power plant.
The Smithsonian’s online registry catalogs thousands of volcanoes
