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Calcareous rock is gutted by hundreds of holes chiseled by poachers to extract date mussels

Off the rocky coast of southeastern Italy, two scuba divers from the financial crimes police bob in and out of the blue waters, under the curious gaze of vacationers.

They’re seeking neither buried treasure nor smuggled contraband, but evidence of the hunt for date mussels, a forbidden mollusc turned status symbol whose poaching is indelibly destroying Italy’s coastlines. 

The signs are unmistakeable. 

Just below the surface, the calcareous rock that is home to countless organisms is gutted by hundreds of manmade holes — proof that unscrupulous poachers have chiselled, crushed and blasted the reef to extract the bivalves burrowed inside.

“These men put on their oxygen tanks and masks, go down… with hammer and chisel and start to break the rock,” said Arcangelo Raffaele Gennari, commander of the Guardia di Finanza in Puglia’s port city of Monopoli.

“There have been cases in which we’ve seized mini jackhammers,” he told AFP during a recent visit. 

“Even explosives have been used.”

Fuelling the trade are the soaring black-market prices for the narrow brown “Lithophaga lithophaga”, said to boast a delicate oyster-like flavour, which can cost nearly 200 euros ($205) per kilo.

Poachers supply fish markets or restaurant owners who sell under the table to high rollers — including cash-rich mafiosi — flaunting their wealth at Sunday lunches with a raw seafood platter or extravagant spaghetti.

“If you think that in an hour and a half, two hours, if you find the right spot you manage to take out eight or nine kilos… you’ve made an exorbitant amount of money in one day,” said Gennari.

– Denuded reefs –

Thirty years ago, marine biologist Stefano Piraino and colleagues discovered that more than 40 percent of Puglia’s Ionian coast was extensively damaged due to date mussel harvesting. 

That research led to Italy’s 1998 law prohibiting their collection, sale and consumption, followed by a 2006 EU-wide ban.

Returning this year to the same areas as part of a government-funded project, Piraino has so far found fewer sites showing recent damage but has little hope for reefs already destroyed.

Time alone does not heal the “all white, denuded” rock surface devoid of life, he said: “It’s a devastating impact”.

Date mussels’ painfully slow growth cycle — taking three decades to grow just five centimetres — means that once taken, they’re not soon replaced. 

But more critical is the impact on the delicate marine ecosystem, where not only the reef but all the organisms dependent on it are destroyed.

A 2019 study by Naples’ Parthenope University found an average of 1,500 manmade holes per square metre in the reefs of the south-western Sorrento Peninsula, damage that ultimately causes the rock to collapse entirely and harm the seabed below.

Researchers are examining ways to help reefs recover, including removing sea urchins, whose grazing prevents new vegetation from growing on rocks, or planting seedlings of tiny organisms in hopes they will propagate.  

But the problem goes beyond Italy, warned Piraino, who called for more education and enforcement throughout the Mediterranean.

A search of TripAdvisor.com found date mussels mentioned by reviewers or shown in photographs as recently as last year in restaurants in Albania, Slovenia and Montenegro, where they are illegal but more easily found.

– Environmental disaster –

In March, environmental groups hailed a six-year prison sentence for the head of a criminal ring operating in protected areas near Naples and the island of Capri — the first-ever conviction for the crime of “environmental disaster” related to date mussels.  

“Attacking the ecosystem isn’t like selling drugs,” said Mariagiorgia De Gennaro, a lawyer for maritime non-profit Marevivo, a party to the case. 

“It’s a domino effect that has an irreversible impact.”

Authorities are increasingly clamping down on every part of the chain, from fishermen to restauranteurs and even consumers.

Last year Puglia seized 97 tons of illegal seafood, including date mussels, the most in Italy, according to environmental group Legambiente. 

Most illegal fishing offences occur in Sicily, Puglia and Campania.

Last month, a video went viral of a man on a beach near Naples hammering a rock to extract the molluscs in full view of sunbathers.

More commonly, perpetrators — usually a diver, helper and lookout — operate at dusk or just before dawn. 

“It’s a niche market operating in the ultimate secrecy,” said police commander Gennari.

But authorities cannot win the battle as long as there remains a willing market from consumers.

“When you eat a plate of linguini with date mussels, a whole square meter of ecosystem has been destroyed,” Piraino said.

With no access to potable running water, the villagers of Ouled Essi Masseoud rely on public fountains and private wells

Mohamed gave up farming because of successive droughts that have hit his previously fertile but isolated village in Morocco and because he just couldn’t bear it any longer.

“To see villagers rush to public fountains in the morning or to a neighbour to get water makes you want to cry,” the man in his 60s said.

“The water shortage is making us suffer,” he told AFP in Ouled Essi Masseoud village, around 140 kilometres (87 miles) from the country’s economic capital Casablanca.

But it is not just his village that is suffering — all of the North African country has been hit.

No longer having access to potable running water, the villagers of Ouled Essi Masseoud rely solely on sporadic supplies in public fountains and from private wells.

“The fountains work just one or two days a week, the wells are starting to dry up and the river next to it is drying up more and more,” said Mohamed Sbai as he went to fetch water from neighbours.

The situation is critical, given the village’s position in the agricultural province of Settat, near the Oum Errabia River and the Al Massira Dam, Morocco’s second largest.

Its reservoir supplies drinking water to several cities, including the three million people who live in Casablanca. But latest official figures show it is now filling at a rate of just five percent.

Al Massira reservoir has been reduced to little more than a pond bordered by kilometres of cracked earth.

Nationally, dams are filling at a rate of only 27 percent, precipitated by the country’s worst drought in at least four decades.

– Water rationing –

At 600 cubic metres (21,000 cubic feet) of water annually per capita, Morocco is already well below the water scarcity threshold of 1,700 cubic metres per capita per year, according to the World Health Organization.

In the 1960s, water availability was four times higher — at 2,600 cubic metres.

A July World Bank report on the Moroccan economy said the decrease in the availability of renewable water resources put the country in a situation of “structural water stress”.

The authorities have now introduced water rationing.

The interior ministry ordered local authorities to restrict supplies when necessary, and prohibits using drinking water to irrigate green spaces and golf courses.

Illegal withdrawals from wells, springs or waterways have also been prohibited.

In the longer term, the government plans to build 20 seawater desalination plants by 2030, which should cover a large part of the country’s needs.

“We are in crisis management rather than in anticipated risk management,” water resources expert Mohamed Jalil told AFP.

He added that it was “difficult to monitor effectively the measures taken by the authorities”.

Agronomist Mohamed Srairi said Morocco’s Achilles’ heel was its agricultural policy “which favours water-consuming fruit trees and industrial agriculture”.

– Key sector –

He said such agriculture relies on drip irrigation which, although it can save water, paradoxically results in increased consumption as previously arid areas become cultivable.

The World Bank report noted that cultivated areas under drip irrigation in Morocco have more than tripled.

It said that “modern irrigation technologies may have altered cropping decisions in ways that increased rather than decreased the total quantity of water consumed by the agricultural sector”.

More than 80 percent of Morocco’s water supply is allocated to agriculture, a key economic sector that accounts for 14 percent of gross domestic product.

Mohamed, in his nineties, stood on an area of parched earth not far from the Al Massira Dam. 

“We don’t plough the land anymore because there is no water,” he said, but added that he had to “accept adversity anyway because we have no choice”.

Younger generations in the village appear more gloomy.

Soufiane, a 14-year-old shepherd boy, told AFP: “We are living in a precarious state with this drought.

“I think it will get even worse in the future.”

Footprints from the late Ice Age some 12,000 years ago were discovered in the US state of Utah when researchers driving past in a car noticed the distinct depressions in a dried river bed

Footprints laid down by Ice Age hunter-gatherers and recently discovered in a US desert are shedding new light on North America’s earliest human inhabitants.

Dozens of fossilized prints found in dried-up riverbeds in the western state of Utah reveal more details about how the continent’s original occupants lived more than 12,000 years ago — just as the frozen planet was starting to thaw.

The fossils could have remained unnoticed if not for a chance glance out of a moving car as researchers Daron Duke and Thomas Urban drove through Hill Air Force Base chatting about footprints.

“We were talking about, ‘What would they look like?'” Duke told AFP. “And he said, ‘Kind of like that out the window.'”

What the men had found turned out to be 88 distinct prints left by a mixture of adults and children.

“They vary between just looking like discolored patches on the ground and… little pop-ups, little pieces of dirt around them or on them. But they look like footprints,” Duke said.

The discovery was followed by a painstaking few days of very careful digging — with Duke sometimes lying on his belly — to ensure that what they were looking at was as old as it appeared.

“What I found was bare feet of people… that had stepped in what looks to be shallow water where there was a mud sub-layer,” Duke explained.

“The minute they pulled their foot out, the sand infilled that and has preserved it perfectly.”

Duke, of the Nevada-based Far Western Anthropological Research Group, had been in the area looking for evidence of prehistoric campfires built by the Shoshone, a people whose descendants still live in the western United States.

He had brought Urban over from Cornell University because of his expertise in uncovering evidence of ancient humans — including the discovery of human tracks in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park that are thought to be up to 23,000 years old.

– ‘Awestruck’ –

The new fossils add to a wealth of other finds from the area — including stone tools, evidence of tobacco use, bird bones and campfire remains — that are starting to provide a more complete record of the Shoshone and their continuous presence in the region beginning 13,000 years ago.

“These are the resident Indigenous people of North America; this is where they lived, and this is where they still live today,” Urban said.

For him personally, finding the footprints has been a professional high point.

“Once I… realized I was digging a human footprint, I was seeing toes, I was seeing the thing in immaculate condition… I was just kind of awestruck by it,” he said.

“Nothing beats the sense of discovery and awe that maybe as an archaeologist, you are actually chasing your whole career.”

And sharing the discovery with the distant descendants of the people who made the prints was immensely rewarding, Urban said.

“You realize the same thing is happening — what the connection is to such a distant past and to something so human, I think it gets to everybody in one way or another eventually.”

The pass between Scex Rouge and Tsanfleuron in western Switzerland has been iced over since at least the Roman era

The thick layer of ice that has covered a Swiss mountain pass for centuries will have melted away completely within a few weeks, a ski resort said Thursday.

Following a dry winter, the summer heatwaves hitting Europe have been catastrophic for the Alpine glaciers, which have been melting at an accelerated rate.

The pass between the Scex Rouge and Tsanfleuron glaciers has been iced over since at least the Roman era.

But as both glaciers have retreated, the bare rock of the ridge between the two is beginning to emerge — and will be completely ice-free before the summer is out.

“The pass will be entirely in the open air in a few weeks,” the Glacier 3000 ski resort said in a statement.

While the ice measured around 15 metres (50 feet) thick in 2012, the ground underneath “will have completely resurfaced by the end of September”.

– Land unseen in centuries –

The ridge is at an altitude of 2,800 metres in the Glacier 3000 ski domain and effectively marks the border between the Vaud and Wallis cantons in western Switzerland.

Skiers could glide over the top from one glacier to the other. But now a strip of rock between them has emerged, with just the last remaining bit of ice left.

“No-one has set foot here for over 2,000 years; that’s very moving,” said Glacier 3000 chief executive Bernhard Tschannen.

The Scex Rouge glacier is likely to turn into a lake within the next 10 to 15 years. It should be about 10 metres deep with a volume of 250,000 cubic metres (8.8 million cubic feet).

The ski resort is working out how to adapt to the new reality if people cannot ski between the two glaciers.

“We are planning to renew the facilities in this area in the coming years, and one idea would be to shift the route of the current chairlift to allow more direct access to the Tsanfleuron glacier,” said Tschannen. 

Covers have been put on sections of the Tsanfleuron glacier by the pass to protect them from the Sun’s melting rays.

Glaciologist Mauro Fischer, a researcher at Bern University, said the loss of thickness of the glaciers in the region will be on average three times higher this year compared to the last 10 summers.

– Bodies emerge from ice –

The melting of the glaciers makes them more unstable, which makes them less viable for winter sports and hiking, but it also means that things buried in the ice for years — even decades — can re-emerge.

In the past two weeks, two human skeletons were found on glaciers in Wallis.

Work is underway to try to identify the remains. According to the Swiss news agency ATS, the Wallis police have a list of some 300 people who have gone missing since 1925.

In July 2017, the Tsanfleuron glacier turned up the bodies of a couple who disappeared in 1942.

The bones of three brothers who died in 1926 were found on the Aletsch glacier in June 2012.

And last week the wreckage of a plane that crashed in the Alps in 1968 was discovered on the Aletsch glacier.

The bodies of the three people on board were recovered at the time but the wreckage was not.

The western United States is more than two decades into a devastating drought, with water levels at Lake Mead, the country's largest reservoir, at historic lows

More than two decades of devastating drought worsened by man-made climate change mean California must harvest, recycle and desalinate much more water, the state’s governor said Thursday.

Unveiling an “aggressive” new strategy to combat a dwindling water supply, Gavin Newsom said he wants to bolster ageing infrastructure to keep pace with the rapidly changing environment.

“Climate change means drought won’t just stick around for two years at a time like it historically has,” Newsom said in a statement.

“Drought is a permanent fixture here in the American West and California will adapt to this new reality.”

The blueprint unveiled Thursday calls for more above-ground storage, as well as better ways to capture the billions of gallons of rain that usually just run into the ocean.

It also includes plans to recycle much more water and to desalinate seawater.

The American West is more than 20 years into its worst drought in over a millennium.

As part of efforts to ride out the drought, residents in southern California have been told not to water their lawns more than once or twice a week — the cause of much grumbling among some of the area’s wealthiest homeowners.

Scientists predict that California’s already-stretched water supplies will dwindle a further 10 percent over the coming decades, with the current drought believed to be part of a long-term aridification of the region.

That process is being hastened by global warming, where humanity’s unchecked burning of fossil fuels continues to pump insulating gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The planet has already warmed by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, and is expected to get even hotter, even if governments meet their pollution reduction targets.

The higher temperatures exacerbate the effects of the drought, with more moisture evaporating from the soil even as plants try to suck more of it up — leaving less to flow into rivers and streams.

“Regardless of drought or flood, in this changed climate there will be less water available for people to use,” the state’s 16-page plan says. 

“To match the pace of climate change, California must move smarter and faster to update our water systems. The modernization of our water systems will help replenish the water California will lose due to hotter, drier weather.”

“California must capture, recycle, de-salt, and conserve more water… to put to use water that would otherwise be unusable, stretch supplies with efficiency, and expand our capacity to bank water from big storms for dry times.”

Over 10,000 firefighters and other security forces are deployed across France

Firefighting teams and equipment from six EU nations started to arrive in France on Thursday to help battle a spate of wildfires, including a fierce blaze in the parched southwest that has forced thousands to evacuate.

Most of the country is sweltering under a summer heatwave compounded by a record drought — conditions most experts say will occur more often as a result of rapid climate change. 

“We must continue, more than ever, our fight against climate disruption and… adapt to this climate disruption,” Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said after arriving at a fire command post in the village of Hostens, south of Bordeaux.

The European Commission said four firefighting planes would be sent to France from Greece and Sweden, as well as teams from Austria, Germany, Poland and Romania.

“Our partners are coming to France’s aid against the fires. Thank you to them. European solidarity is at work!” President Emmanuel Macron tweeted.

“Across the country over 10,000 firefighters and security forces are mobilised against the flames… These soldiers of fire are our heroes,” he said.

In total, 361 foreign firefighters were  dispatched to assist their 1,100 French colleagues deployed in the worst-hit part of the French southwest.

A first contingent of 65 German firefighters, followed by their 24 vehicles, arrived Thursday afternoon and were to go into action at dawn Friday, officials said.

Among eight major fires currently raging, the biggest is the Landiras fire in the southwest Gironde department, whose forests and beaches draw huge tourist crowds each summer.

It had already burned 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) in July — the driest month seen in France since 1961 — before being contained, but it continued to smoulder in the region’s tinder-dry pine forests and peat-rich soil.

Since flaring up again Tuesday, which officials suspect may have been caused by arson, it has burned 7,400 hectares, destroyed or damaged 17 homes, and forced 10,000 people to quit their homes, said Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Mendousse of the Gironde fire and rescue service.

Borne said nine firefighting planes are already dumping water on the blaze, with two more to be in service by the weekend.

– ‘California’ –

“We battled all night to stop the fire from spreading, notably to defend the village of Belin-Beliet,” Mendousse told journalists in Hostens.

On several houses nearby, people hung out white sheets saying: “Thank you for saving our homes” and other messages of support for the weary fire battalions.

“You’d think we’re in California, it’s gigantic… And they’re used to forest fires here but we’re being overwhelmed on all sides — nobody could have expected this,” Remy Lahlay, a firefighter deployed near Hostens in the Landes de Gascogne natural park, told AFP.

With temperatures in the region hitting nearly 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) Thursday and forecast to stay high until at least Sunday, “there is a very serious risk of new outbreaks” for the Landiras fire, the prefecture of the Gironde department said.

Acrid smoke has spread across much of the southwestern Atlantic coast and its beaches that draw huge crowds of tourists each summer, with the regional ARS health agency “strongly” urging people to wear protective face masks.

The smoke also forced the closing of the A63 motorway, a major artery toward Spain, between Bordeaux and Bayonne.

The government has urged employers to allow leaves of absence for volunteer firefighters to help fight the fires.

In Portugal Thursday, more than 1,500 firefighters were also battling a fire that has raged for days in the mountainous Serra da Estrela natural park in the centre of the country.  

It has already burned 10,000 hectares, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

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Soaring temperatures and energy prices are imposing tough choices about crops, says Andrew Blenkiron, of Euston Estate farm in southeastern England

Pulling up some of the sugar beet that should be about handball-size by now, Andrew Blenkiron says the parched conditions have left the root veggies stunted and dried-up.

Record-breaking temperatures — as well as skyrocketing energy prices — mean the UK farm that he manages has had to make difficult decisions about which crops to save.

“This is about four to five centimetres (just under two inches) across,” Blenkiron says, holding up some undersized sugar beet in a vast and dry field at the Euston Estate farm.

“By this time usually we would expect them to be at least 20 cm in diametre, the sugar beet,” he adds, sounding worried.

The estate, 90 miles (130 kilometres) northeast of London, is now focused on watering its potatoes, which are in season.

But there is not enough water for its sugar beet crop, which has been left to fend for itself.

In this part of Suffolk in southeastern England, the soil is considered very fertile, as long as it receives enough nutrients and water. 

But rainfall here in July was just 10 percent of the average amount — and over the last three months, it was only half.

– Twice as much watering –

The electricity bill at the Euston Estate farm is set to more than quadruple this year, Blenkiron, the estate director, tells AFP.

That will put it in the region of £370,000 ($438,000 and euros).

While energy prices have tripled, the huge hike is also down to the large estate of 10,500 acres (4,250 hectares) having to pump more water to irrigate its root crops in the hot weather. 

Due to the “incredible heat and the incredible dry winds”, workers have to water the potato fields with “probably twice the frequency”, Blenkiron says.

Months of exceptionally dry weather across England have taken their toll, with temperatures topping 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) in some regions.

The estate, which has been owned for 350 years by the Duke of Grafton, has two huge reservoirs, each of which normally contains 363 million litres.

But the sloping sides of one of them are currently exposed and dry, with water only at the bottom. 

“We’re estimating at this present point in time that we’ll see a yield reduction of about 50 percent,” Blenkiron says, of the sugar beet crop.

He’s still holding out hope of rainfall before the sugar factory opens in late September, he adds.

“Sugar beet has the ability to recover quite significantly,” he says.

It is already too late, though, for the forage maize which has died, creating a knock-on effect for the farm — which also produces wheat, barley, chickens and pigs — later in the year. 

– ‘Real challenges’ in winter – 

A lack of forage maize will lead to “some real challenges” in winter, the farm manager says.

Not only is it used to feed the animals but it also fuels the farm’s anaerobic digester which produces methane gas that is piped into the national gas grid, the farm manager says. 

Soaring oil prices have also caused the price of fertilisers to triple and have doubled the running costs of tractors and combine harvesters.

Such price rises hit the estate hard, as sales of its 2022 harvest have already been fixed under contract.

With UK inflation set to peak this year at the highest level since 1980, Blenkiron says that if energy prices don’t come down next season, “we’re going to have to pass those costs on to our customers”.

And more difficult choices loom, he warns, if there is not enough rain next winter.

“We’ll have to make some very difficult decisions as to what quantity of crops we plant next year.”

Previous studies have concluded the Arctic was warming between two and three times faster than the global average

The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet over the last 40 years, according to research published Thursday that suggests climate models are underestimating the rate of polar heating.

The United Nations’ climate science panel said in a special report in 2019 that the Arctic was warming “by more than double the global average” due to a process known as Arctic amplification.

This occurs when sea ice and snow, which naturally reflect the Sun’s heat, melt into sea water, which absorbs it instead. 

While there is a long-held consensus among scientists that the Arctic is warming quickly, estimates vary according to the timeframe studied and the definition of what constitutes the geographic area of the Arctic. 

A team of researchers based in Norway and Finland analysed four sets of temperature data gathered by satellite studies since 1979 — the year when satellite data became available — over the entire Arctic circle. 

They found that on average the data showed the Arctic had warmed 0.75C per decade, nearly four times quicker than the rest of the planet. 

“The take in the literature is that the Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the globe, so for me it was a bit surprising that ours was so much higher than the usual number,” Antti Lipponen, co-author from the Finnish Meteorological Institute, told AFP. 

The study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, found significant regional variations in warming rate within the Arctic circle. 

For example, the Eurasian sector of the Arctic Ocean, near the Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya archipelagos, has warmed as much as 1.25C per decade — seven times faster than the rest of the world.

The team found that even state-of-the-art climate models predicted Arctic warming to be approximately one third lower than what the observed data showed. 

They said that this discrepancy may be due to previous modelled estimates being rendered out of date by continued Arctic modelling.

“Maybe the next step would be to take a look at the models and I would be really interested in seeing why the models do not reproduce what we see in observations and what impact that is having on future climate projections,” said Lipponen. 

As well as profoundly impacting local communities and wildlife that rely on sea ice to hunt, intense warming in the Arctic will have worldwide repercussions. 

The Greenland ice sheet, which recent studies warn may be approaching a melting “tipping point”, contains enough frozen water to lift Earth’s oceans some six metres.  

“Climate change is caused by humans. As the Arctic warms up its glaciers will melt and this will globally affect sea levels,” said Lipponen. 

“Something is happening in the Arctic and it will affect us all.”

Hikers making the trek this week were well-equipped, with walking sticks, hiking boots and rain gear

Tens of thousands of people have braved a steep, rugged trail in Iceland to catch a rare glimpse of an active volcano after it erupted last week, spewing red-hot lava into the sky.  

Tourism officials said Thursday that almost 23,000 people had made the difficult, hours-long trek to spot the volcano in the Meradalir valley, just 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the capital. 

“We’ve been here for three, four hours and we never get tired of it, it’s always moving”, said Jean-Paul Couturier, a French pensioner on vacation in Iceland.

The hike to the newly-formed crater is a 14 kilometres round-trip across tough terrain, with a 300-metre (985-foot) ascent. The walk takes about two hours from the nearest car park.

Strong winds and rain have done little to deter crowds.

On Wednesday alone — when authorities reopened the site following a three-day closure — more than 4,600 people took in the mesmerising views of the red-hot magma. 

The volcano is located in the Meradalir valley, an uninhabited area that would normally not attract more than a few visitors.

Known as the land of fire and ice, Iceland has 32 volcanic systems currently considered active, the highest number in Europe. It had an eruption every five years on average.

The latest volcano erupted in the Meradalir valley on August 3 and has continued at a fairly stable rate since, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said. 

– ‘Nature’s power’ –

“It would be very easy for it to last as long as the previous one”, vulcanologist Thorvaldur Thordarson told AFP.

Last year, lava spewed from the nearby Mount Fagradalsfjall volcano for six months, the longest eruption in Iceland in more than 50 years.

Hikers making the trek on Wednesday were well-equipped with walking sticks, hiking boots and rain gear. 

It was a sharp contrast from the shorts and flip flops worn by some of the first curious onlookers who initially rushed to the scene. 

Observers watch from a safe distance the red-orange lava fountains spurting as high as 70 meters before falling back to the ground, forming a large blanket of magma and a volcanic semi-cone as it solidified.

The lava reaches temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,192 Fahrenheit), the hottest lava produced on Earth, and has so far flowed almost two kilometres to the south across the valley.

“The hot rock shooting out of the earth is really the first most impressive thing that you see,” American tourist James Maniscalco said.

For French tourist Clemence Ernoult, the experience was as rare as it gets. 

“You really see Nature’s power,” she said.  

“It’s something you’ll probably only see once in your life”.

Seoul said it wants to get rid of basement flats — known as "banjiha" — which are prone to damp and flooding

South Korea’s capital has moved to ban the cramped basement flats made famous by Oscar-winning movie “Parasite” after four people drowned in subterranean dwellings during flooding caused by record-breaking rains this week.

Soldiers and relief workers were clearing debris Thursday from waterlogged, mud-covered homes in Gwanak district, an AFP reporter saw, where three tenants, including a disabled woman and a teenager, died Monday.

Their deaths — trapped by floodwater in their basement apartment — have caused public outrage, with President Yoon Suk-yeol visiting their destroyed home this week before calling on officials to do more to help the poor and vulnerable during natural disasters.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has announced they want to get rid of tiny, cramped basement flats — known as “banjiha” — which are typically cheap to rent but prone to damp and flooding.

Around 200,000 households live in such flats, which make up around five percent of housing stock in the South Korean capital, according to official figures.

Seoul said in a press release Wednesday that it will stop issuing permits to construct such homes, while pushing to gradually phase out existing basement and semi-basement flats.

The city plans to begin discussions with the national government to ban the use of basements or semi-basement spaces for residential purposes, it added.

Four out of 11 people killed in this week’s record downpours drowned after their basement flats were inundated with floodwater, officials have said.

Such abodes received global attention due to Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite”, which won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar and features a poor family living in a dank basement home.

Activists blamed the “banjiha” deaths this week on the government’s housing policies, saying they were preventable disasters.

“We condemn the government’s negligence regarding those marginalised people in this housing,” said the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice in a statement.

“As rainfall becomes stronger and more frequent under the influence of climate change, (Seoul) must embark on a fundamental change of its approach to basement residents,” it added.

Yoon has also blamed climate change for the rains and flooding, which he said were the worst since weather records began over a century ago.

“Those who struggle financially or with physical difficulties are bound to be more vulnerable to natural disasters,” he said.