Earthquake activity during the 1983 Etna eruption

Seismic stations, with automatic P-picking and satellite retransmission were set up on Mount Etna following the eruption started on March 1983. Positions of the stations were chosen in order to complement the permanent telemetered network of Catania University.Comparison between locations obtained by both networks were made for earthquakes recorded by at least 5 ARGOS DCP (Data Collection Platform) stations. We observed a satisfactory agreement for events inside both networks.By merging data of both networks, it has been possible to locate more than 50 earthquakes for which separate computation was not possible due to the low number of arrivals.On 3rd-4th June a swarm of deep seismic events was observed. Hypocenters of these earthquakes are clearly located in a NNW-SSE-trending vertical zone of 5 km width at a depth of 7–36 km.Changes in the distribution of shallow seismic activity, before and after this swarm, have been observed.