These Volcanoes Are Undead

I'd have gone with the article's title:

> When “Extinct” Volcanoes Reawaken

Mostly because the scare quotes point out the real problem - the human propensity toward tragically motivated reasoning. Whether it's flood plains, hurricane-prone shorelines, actually rumbling-and-smoking volcanoes, or other dangers - humans want to believe that some convenient of combination of divine sanction, cool-sounding logic, reassuring stories, and willful ignorance will magically ensure that their wishes will come true. No downsides, no "gotcha's".

So-called "extinct" volcanoes are filled with a lot more fury than their millennia-long slumber would suggest. These were the findings of an international team of scientists who recently reconstructed the long history of a 1,400-foot volcano known as Methana, near Athens, Greece, which looms over the Saronic Gulf in the Aegean Sea. Methana last erupted around 2,200 years ago. The ancient Greek historian Strabo was there—or close enough: “A seven-stage high mountain was raised from a fiery eruption, during the day inaccessible due to the heat and sulfurous odor, but at night fragrant, glowing from afar and warming the sea for five stadia, and murky,” he wrote.