Furnas drops back to V0, leaving three Azores volcanic systems on alert
The Furnas classification ran for eight days and lapsed. We went back to the CIVISA page and counted again: Santa Bárbara and the west Terceira fissural system, both at V1 since July, and Manadas on São Jorge, at V1 since March 2024.
Furnas is back at V0. The classification CIVISA gave the São Miguel volcano on 8 September ran for eight days, was not renewed, and the system has returned to the resting state it occupies almost all of the time.
The announcement itself is not the interesting part, and the regional press has already carried it. The count is. When Furnas went up, we counted the entries on the CIVISA alerts page and found four Azorean volcanic systems sitting at V1 simultaneously. A count is only ours if we run it again, so we went back this morning.
Three left
With Furnas gone, the CIVISA alert-status page now lists the Santa Bárbara volcano and the West Terceira Fissural Volcanic System, both at V1 since July 2026, and the Manadas Fissural Volcanic System on São Jorge, at V1 since March 2024.
That last date is the one worth sitting with. March 2024 was thirty months ago. An Azorean volcanic system has been formally classified as being in metastable equilibrium for two and a half consecutive years, and across that time nobody on São Jorge stopped going to work, planting, opening a café or meeting the boat. That is the missing scale whenever one of these alerts reaches a headline.
What V1 means, briefly
The CIVISA volcanic alert scale has eight steps. V0 is a system at rest. V1, the step above it, describes a system in metastable equilibrium with weak activity. At the top, V7 is an eruption already under way. Six levels separate Manadas from that.
In an archipelago built entirely by active volcanism, three systems at V1 is not an anomaly. It is roughly the baseline. What a level rise changes is the density of monitoring — more readings, more field teams, more bulletins — not daily life on the islands. The Furnas drop returns the Azores to the number they were running before September, and the next move in this count is far more likely to be another temporary rise than a permanent exit from the list.
Image: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
