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Santorini is perched on the caldera cliff overlooking Nea Kameni Island.
The whitewashed villas of Santorini.
The city of Santorini built on the caldera wall.
Santorini is a popular tourist destination.
View of the craters on Nea Kameni.
Santorini is one of several active volcanoes in the Cyclades and Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. The whitewashed city is built on the edge of a caldera with spectacular views in almost every direction.
At one time, Santorini was one huge cone-shaped volcano. However, several hundred thousand years ago, eruptions emptied the magma chamber below causing the central section of the cone to collapse creating a huge rimmed bowl-shaped structure called a caldera. And the town of Santorini is perched on 300 m (980 ft) cliffs that exist along the edge of the caldera. You can’t miss the mostly submerged caldera if you look at a map of Santorini. It’s an almost circular island with the caldera in the western portion of the island. The caldera prior to the last huge eruption 3,600 years ago, was nearly contiguous. But several sections of the caldera were blown away or collapsed during what is now referred to as the Minoan eruption.
The Minoan eruption was a titanic event that scattered volcanic debris over the Aegean region. Some of the tephra deposits from the eruption are more than 60 m (220 ft) thick in places on Santorini itself. Archaeological excavations at Akrotini on Santorini have uncovered Minoan structures and artifacts buried by the eruption. It has been postulated that the Minoan civilization centered on Crete disappeared from tsunamis generated by the Minoan eruption. But the end of the Minoan civilization ended nearly 90 years after the eruption making the hypothesis suspect.
The small island of Nea Kameni formed from less violent eruptions that built a submerged dome structure in the center of the caldera over thousands of years that finally pierced the ocean surface in 1707. Eruptions from the craters on Nea Kameni have continued periodically, continuously adding to the island over the centuries. Nea Kameni last erupted in 1950. If you have a chance, visit Nea Kameni while you are on Santorini. A few of the craters still produce steam and sulfurous gases.
Santorini (Greek: Σαντορίνη, pronounced [sandoˈrini]), classically Thera (pron.: /ˈθɪrə/), and officially Thira (Greek: Θήρα [ˈθira]), is an island in the southern Aegean Sea, about 200 km (120 mi) southeast from Greece's mainland. It is the largest island of a small, circular archipelago which bears the same name and is the remnant of a volcanic caldera. It forms the southernmost member of the Cyclades group of islands, with an area of approximately 73 km
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