Chaos and stochasticity in volcanic eruptions the case of Mount Etna and Vesuvius

The series of historical eruptions of Mount Etna and Vesuvius volcanoes are analyzed to verify the presence of low-dimensional chaos in the mechanism driving eruptive activity. A recently developed optimal methodology which is efficient on relatively small sets of data is used. The results indicate that there is no evidence of low-dimensional chaos in the sequences considered, and the mechanism appears better described by a classical stationary stochastic process.