WATCH: Mount Etna erupts, forcing tourists to evacuate

CapeTalk's Clarence Ford speaks to Barbara Friedman about trending online stories. 

Listen below:

On Monday, Mount Etna in Sicily, Europe's largest, most active volcano and a popular World Heritage Site, erupted, spewing a huge column of gas and ash into the sky above the Italian island. 

While the eruption has ended, footage is still being shared on social media, showing clouds of black smoke and tourists, who had been sightseeing at the popular destination, running away from the eruption in terror.

Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology said that the volcano was experiencing strong strombolian explosions 'of growing intensity' and moved with pyroclastic flow, which is a fast-moving, dangerous current of hot gas and volcanic matter that travels along the ground away from a volcano.

According to the Volcanic Discovery website, before the eruption, there were volcanic tremors which began at around 10 pm local time and reached their peak shortly before 1 am.

The Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in Toulouse, one of nine such centres worldwide used to monitor aviation risks, warned that a volcanic ash plume had reached an altitude of around 6,400 metres before downgrading the threat level to yellow late on Monday afternoon.

"It is one of those constantly slightly erupting volcanoes, so people aren't always too concerned, but there are always tourists who go there and stop at a certain point, they don't necessarily go further, but this round that was reported on Monday has been a lot more intense..."

- Barbara Friedman

"The videos that have gone viral... some of them are very frightening and the people look close-ish and running. Then, in other videos, people are a bit further away and a lot of commentary on how slow these people were running... people were like, 'What's going on here? It looks like they're running in lower case'... the comments were hilarious."

- Barbara Friedman

"It was scary to see all these tourists running... no matter how far away they looked, I think there was danger."

- Barbara Friedman

Watch the moment captured below:

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