His joke didn’t have the desired effect. A renowned Greek seismologist is being investigated following an April Fool’s joke in which he announced that a huge funnel could open under the volcanic island of Santorini, a famous tourist destination.
Akis Tselentis, director of the Institute of Geodynamics and the Tsunami Center of Greece, posted a photo on Facebook on Wednesday of him posing as a false culprit, with a sign in his hands on which he had writes: “Guilty of the April Fool’s joke”. “We live in a country where humor is persecuted while child molesters, rapists and fraudsters are not,” he lamented.
A funnel that could “suck up the waters of the Aegean Sea”
On Tuesday, a prosecutor ordered a preliminary investigation into whether Akis Tselentis’ April 1 post qualified as spreading fake news. “Things are not going well in Santorini,” the seismologist said on Facebook. And to add: “Since January, we have witnessed the gradual disappearance of the magma under the volcano. Akis Tselentis claimed in his joke that there was a “major possibility” that magma was moving towards a fictional volcano, creating a funnel-shaped void that could “suck in the waters of the Aegean”.
Santorini was completely reshaped by a volcanic eruption at the end of the 17th century BCE, which wiped out the Minoan civilization. Its geothermal activity, accompanied by seismic tremors, remains high to this day. The last major eruption of the most active part of the volcano, beneath the uninhabited lava islet of Kameni, near Santorini, occurred in 1950.
