An increase in the mass eruption rate at Mount Etna since 1971 is coupled with a shift in Sr-Nd isotope ratios, enhancing a trend that has characterized the volcano since its earliest stages of activity. After 1971, rapid geochemical variations provide evidence for mixing and mingling of magma batches with different geochemical characteristics in a highly dynamic regime. Magma mixing is evidenced by changes in the Sr isotope composition of the erupted products as well as by isotopic disequilibrium between pyroxene phenocrysts and the whole rocks. The early appearance of clinopyroxene on the liquidus of the magmas combined with thermobarometric estimates suggest that clinopyroxene can be used as a tracer of polybaric crystallization processes that take place mostly at mantle depths, along equilibrium liquid lines of descent from parental magmas with water contents between 1 and 3% by weight. Rising magmas seem to have ponded at the crust-mantle boundary for short periods of time, from where they started to rise along a steeper d P /d T gradient, greater than that to the high-velocity crustal body seismically imaged at ∼10 km beneath the volcano summit. Sr isotope disequilibrium between clinopyroxene phenocrysts and the whole rocks provides evidence that crystal mushes at different depths may be incorporated into subsequent magma batches affecting both the crystal size distribution and isotopic composition of clinopyroxene.

Abstract A catalogue of citations related to possible meteorites has been assembled by searching the ancient Greek and Latin literature up to the end of the West Roman Empire ( AD 476). The catalogue illustrates the attitude of ancient populations towards the fall of meteorites and extends the record of meteorite falls back in time. The citations are arranged in the catalogue as: i) ‘meteorite falls’, when both the locality and the date of the fall are, at least approximately, indicated; ii) ‘worshipped stones’, when the written and archaeological sources suggest the actual existence of a stone as an object of worship, but the information about the locality and the date of the fall are missing or vague; iii) ‘myths’, when the connexion between an object said to have fallen from the heaven and the fall of a meteorite is weak or obscured by mythological traditions.