ALBERT

Description: Fluid geochemistry monitoring in the Azores involves the regular sampling and analysis of gas discharges from fumaroles and measurements of CO2 diffuse soil gas emissions. Main degassing areas under monitoring are associated with hydrothermal systems of active central volcanoes in S. Miguel, Terceira and Graciosa islands. Fumarole discharge analysis since 1991 show that apart from steam these gas emissions are CO2 dominated with H2S, H2, CH4 and N2 in minor amounts. Mapping of CO2 diffuse soil emissions in S. Miguel Island lead to the conclusion that some inhabited areas are located within hazard-zones. At Furnas village, inside Furnas volcano caldera, about 62% of the 896 houses are within the CO2 anomaly, 5% being in areas of moderate to high risk. At Ribeira Seca, on the north flank of Fogo volcano, few family houses were evacuated when CO2 concentrations in the air reached 8 mol%. To assess and analyse the CO2 soil flux emissions, continuous monitoring stations were installed in S. Miguel (2), Terceira and Graciosa islands. The statistical analysis of the data showed that some meteorological parameters influence the CO2 flux. The average of CO2 flux in S. Miguel stations ranges from 250 g/m2/d at Furnas volcano to 530 g/m2/d at Fogo volcano. At Terceira Island it is about 330 g/m2/d and at Graciosa 4400 g/m2/d.

Description: Published

Description: JCR Journal

Description: open

Description: Emeritus Professor Samuel Warren Carey passed away on 20 March 2002 at age 90. He was born at Campbelltown, New South Wales on 1st November 1911, and attended school at the Canterbury Boys High School. Carey’s father was a printer, who became a public lecturer when he arrived in Australia. His mother’s people were early Australian settlers. The Carey home was a farm near Campbelltown and as a boy, little Samuel walked nearly seven miles to School and back each day, an activity that prepared him for work in harsh climatic and environmental conditions. Sam Carey’s large family included two sisters and four brothers, one of whom died in World War II. At the University of Sydney, in 1929, Carey enrolled in chemistry, physics, and mathematics and only as a fourth subject – geology. However, he was soon reoriented towards geology as his main subject by Sir Edgeworth David, an Antarctic explorer. This preference developed from his liking for fieldwork in geology, combined with lab work. He was strongly inclined towards sports (hockey, sailing, rugby, marksmanship, canoeing) and physical activities (cave exploration, rock climbing, hiking, jungle expeditions, parachuting). He graduated in Geology from the University of Sydney earning a Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours in 1933, Master of Science in 1934, and Doctor of Science in 1939. At university he founded the Student’s Geological Society in 1931 and was its first president. He has been a pioneer in geology all his life. He was fortunate to participate as a protagonist for two and possibly three revolutions in the Earth sciences. He challenged the concept of continents in fixed positions from the outset and from 1946 to 1956 he taught a version of intercontinental movement with subduction in deep ocean trenches. This came to be called ‘plate tectonics’ some twenty years later but at the time when no one believed in any form of intercontinental movement, Carey’s version was also called ‘continental drift’ by default. Carey developed a new way to interpret orogens. He did not ascribe the building of mountain chains to compression – as is commonly accepted by the geological community involved in contraction or pulsation tectonics. Carey ascribed it to isostatic instability where rising mantle beneath deep sediment filled trenches causes diapiric uplift. The observed folding was explained as the consequent downward gravitational sliding of uplifted strata. This mountain building concept is still considered valid today and it constitutes part of a more diversified classification of mountain evolution that has been developed by Cliff Ollier. Carey proposed abandonment of the subduction concept, and put forward step by step the concept of Earth expansion. Carey – using the orocline concept – generalised his views on movement between continents, demonstrating that the continents could fit together better if the Earth was smaller in size.

Description: Published

Description: 85-95

Description: open

Description: Il Vesuvio è noto nel mondo soprattutto per la grande eruzione del 79 d.C., che distrusse in soli due giorni Pompei, Ercolano, Oplonti e Stabia. Dopo il 79 d.C., il Vesuvio ha alternato periodi di attività, caratterizzati da frequenti eruzioni di media energia, a periodi di riposo, lunghi anche molti secoli e interrotti da violente eruzioni esplosive come quelle del 472 d.C. e del 1631. L’attività del vulcano negli ultimi tre secoli è stata caratterizzata da eruzioni di moderata energia ma di grande effetto spettacolare, che hanno reso il Vesuvio meta di viaggiatori, scienziati, letterati e artisti da tutto il mondo. Dopo l’eruzione del 1944, il vulcano è entrato in una fase di quiescenza, la cui durata è impossibile da prevedere. Negli ultimi decenni il vulcano è stato caratterizzato da una debole attività fumarolica, prevalentemente nell’area craterica, e da attività sismica con scosse di energia medio-bassa. La storia eruttiva del Vesuvio indica che il vulcano non può essere considerato estinto ed è molto probabile che l’attuale quiescenza venga interrotta da una nuova, violenta eruzione. L’Osservatorio Vesuviano, inaugurato nel 1845 da Ferdinando II re delle Due Sicilie, è il primo osservatorio vulcanologico al mondo. Ha permesso per oltre centocinquanta anni l’osservazione minuziosa delle eruzioni vesuviane e dei loro precursori. Oggi vigila sullo stato di attività dei vulcani campani, pronto a cogliere i primi segni di riattivazione. La mostra Vesuvio: 2000 anni di osservazioni conduce il visitatore attraverso un affascinante percorso nel mondo dei vulcani, e del Vesuvio in particolare: descrive i vari tipi di eruzioni e i pericoli relativi, spiega come si ricostruisce la storia di un vulcano, presenta ricche collezioni di campioni di rocce e minerali vesuviani e di strumenti storici, libri e dipinti. È possibile anche osservare la registrazione in tempo reale di dati sismici della rete dell’INGV - Osservatorio Vesuviano. L’obiettivo principale del Museo è fornire soprattutto agli abitanti dell’area vesuviana, ma anche al vasto pubblico che visita il Vesuvio, informazioni sui principali pericoli vulcanici attesi e sulle metodologie di monitoraggio.

Description: Published

Description: 5.8. TTC - Formazione e informazione

Description: open

Description: Giovanni Capellini (1833-1922) was one of the leading representatives of the Italian and international scientific community from the mid-19th century until 1922, the year of his death. Professor of Geology at the University of Bologna from 1860, geologist, palaeontologist and archaeologist, in 1871 he organised, straight after the unification of Italy, the 5th International Congress in Archaeology and Prehistoric Anthropology, first in Italy, and in 1881 brought to Bologna, for the first time ever in Italy, the 2nd International Geological Congress. His studies and publications strongly influenced the geological thinking of his times. At the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna there are as many as 30,000 documents from his scientific letters (The Capellini Archive), the result of an intense correspondence he had with geologists, seismologists, astronomers and meteorologists, but also with people from the world of culture and politics. The letters relating to the earth sciences, from scientific but also political point of view, are the majority. The archive includes letters from more then 4,300 senders, of which at least 25% foreign ones incuding Charles Lyell (geologist), Emmanuel Friedlaender (volcanologist), Philip Eduard De Verneuil (naturalist), Henry James Johnston Lavis (volcanologist).

Description: Published

Description: 667-677

Description: 5.2. TTC - Banche dati di sismologia strumentale

Description: JCR Journal

Description: open

Description: The main points of the life and scientific production of Ott Christoph Hilgenberg (1896-1976) have been reconstructed. The events took place between America and Berlin: in America from 1925 to 1928 the young Hilgenberg, with a diploma in Mechanical Engineering, worked as a Geophysicist in an oil prospecting company. It was there that he probably developed his interdisciplinary ideas, which, influenced in various ways by the European cultural climate, brought him into the field of global tectonics. He conceived a theory about the expansion of the Earth based on the nature of the gravity field. In 1933, the theory was published in his classic work 'Vom wachsenden Erdball'. Upon his return in Germany he performed various types of research at the School of Engineering, then that of Geology and Paleontology at the Technical University of Berlin. He was also briefly involved as editor of the scientific publications at the Technical University of Berlin, where he made a contribution towards saving the book collection as the war ended. During the years spent in Berlin, he continued to refine his elegant version of the theory of Earth’s expansion publishing articles and books on this subject up to the last years in his life. The importance of Hilgenberg lies in the fact that he marks the beginning of the integration of various scientific disciplines from Physics to Paleontology and Paleomagnetism, in support of a universal tectonic theory, and that he made paleogeographic reconstructions on globes with smaller radii than the present one. All those who have worked or are working with one of the versions of expansion tectonics owe him enormous gratitude for his inspiration and for the scientific and moral lesson of fifty years spent in unflagging defence of his ideas. The material gathered and kindly made available by his daughter Helge has been indispensable for this recalling.

Description: Published

Description: 25-41

Description: open

Description: Roberto Mantovani, violinist and scientist,born in Parma on March 25, 1854. He was part of an orches-tral team reaching the volcanic Réunion Island in 1878. During his stay on the island, Mantovani had the occasion of observing the huge volcanic fractures on the Indian ocean shore near the town of Saint Denis. He argued that, on a global scale, all the continents might have undergone the same disjunction processes as the volcanic flanks. The global fractures are today the oceans. After several years from his observations, Mantovani published his idea in 1889 in the Bulletin of the Societé des Sciences et des Arts of Saint Denis, where the Italian established his family and became Consul of Italy. After an economic crisis and an epidemic plague in the Réunion Island, Roberto Mantovani left his post as Consul to go and live in San Servan, near the port of Saint Malo, in northern France, where he continued his activity as violinist, managing a school of music. As a scientist, he gave public conferences on the idea of planetary expansion. Mantovani was not a mere precursor of the continental drift idea: instead, Mantovani’s ideas on Earth expansion were more general compared to those of Wegener who was not taking into account the possibility of variation of the Earth’s radius. Roberto Mantovani, violinist and scientist, was part of an orches-tral team reaching the volcanic Réunion Island in 1878. During his stay on the island, Mantovani had the occasion of observing the huge volcanic fractures on the Indian ocean shore near the town of Saint Denis. He argued that, on a global scale, all the continents might have undergone the same disjunction processes as the volcanic flanks. The global fractures are today the oceans. After several years from his observations, Mantovani published his idea in 1889 in the Bulletin of the Societé des Sciences et des Arts of Saint Denis, where the Italian established his family and became Consul of Italy. After an economic crisis and an epidemic plague in the Réunion Island, Roberto Mantovani left his post as Consul to go and live in San Servan, near the port of Saint Malo, in northern France, where he continued his activity as violinist, managing a school of music. As a scientist, he gave public conferences on the idea of planetary expansion. His more famous paper, quoted later by Wegener, was published in 1909, in a popular magazine 'Je m’instruis'. The paper contains the first suggestive mapping of the breakup of the Pangea continent based on geological arguments. The great novelty in the 1909 paper was the mapping of the Pacific view: dotted lines were drown between pairs of geographical points which once were in contact while today are separated by the huge extension of the Pacific basin. The idea was that the corresponding points were in contact before the expansion of the Earth. The enlarging of the huge fractures formed all oceans. We had to wait the sixties to find the same kind of lines in the Indian and Atlantic oceans in plate tectonics. According to plate tectonics this is not true for the Pacific Ocean, because in this case the plate movement is inverse and the ocean tends towards closing. The 1909 Pacific map was forgotten, and only Mantovani’s Pangea representation is reproduced today in some books dealing with the history of science.

Description: Published

Description: 71-74

Description: open

Description: In the last years the assessment of the science outreach activity has become a fundamental moment of the planning and realization of the activities of the Laboratorio of Didattica and Divulgazione Scientifica of Rome. On the occasion of the XVIII Edizione della Settimana della Cultura Scientifica e Tecnologica, we have established to experiment a new effectiveness science outreach assessment centred on two observation points: the users of the initiatives and the laboratory staff. From this model two different assessment tools derived: the Satisfaction Questionnaires, filled by users and the Technical Questionnaires, filled by the laboratory staff. This formulation has allowed us to get complex information on the whole science outreach process and has guaranteed a better impartiality in the assessment. The data collected offers some information on the key elements to achieve and to improve the effectiveness of outreach of a scientific initiative.

Description: Published

Description: 1-24

Description: 5.8. TTC - Formazione e informazione

Description: N/A or not JCR

Description: open

Description: This work develops a critical reflection on the activities for information, training and education conducted by a group of researchers of the INGV in recent years. In particular, our analysis, from an epistemological point of view, is between: science outreach, the link between science and the world; science teaching and its role of contact between science and school; risk education, imaged as a process able to develop a culture of risk in relation to the territory in which we live. These issues are critically analyzed on the basis of experience gained since 1995. The educational methodologies tested in "peacetime", out of seismic events, with the EDURISK Project are compared with those experienced during the emergency in Abruzzo. Increasingly today, we refer to prevention as a primary strategy of defense against risk. But very often the responsibility of making prevention falls on the others as government, institutions, local authorities and the citizen perceive themselves as powerless against the inevitability of natural events and refer to the rulers for the implementation of effective prevention policies. As researchers, what are the most effective actions we can take to influence the risk reduction and motivate the choices of people? The effectiveness of our interventions must be based on scientific information, on a specific training, or must be reached to develop values, actions, awareness? Our interventions must be oriented and developed to inform, to train or to educate?

Description: Published

Description: 445-451

Description: 5.9. Formazione e informazione

Description: JCR Journal

Description: open

Description: There are thousands of ways to achieve a sustainable future for our Planet. Some of these follow high-value scientific research activities, while others simply aim to increase people’s awareness of what can and should be done to improve our, and our children’s, quality of life. The easiest way to develop this specific kind of ‘spread of culture’ consists of bringing back to life what was preserved of the history of a population and of a territory, by representing it in a renewed form, and by making it ‘food for thought’. The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), followed this approach and decided to publish two volumes where the objective was to make people more aware of the geological and volcanic risks in some specific areas of Italy. The immediacy of the photography is used to tell the stories of volcanoes and earthquakes, to represent past events that have become ‘memories’ and to use these as a basis to build a better future. “Terre di Fuoco” and “Terremoto Calabro-Messinese, 1908/2008” are the two photographic books that have been published by INGV in cooperation with Alinari, the oldest firm in the world in the field of photography and image communication. The photographs selected to be included in the two books had a double significance: on the one side, they had to convey to the reader the immediacy of emotions that other people had felt and lived; and on the other side, they had to make people understand the importance of prevention. The fascination of history, the importance of memories of the past and the extraordinary strength of images help the reader build a link between the past, the present and the future, where the lesson learnt from the past centuries and from the study of the Earth and its energy help us to understand which steps should be taken to achieve a “sustainable” future.

Description: Published

Description: 427-431

Description: 5.9. Formazione e informazione

Description: JCR Journal

Description: open

Description: Nel presente lavoro è illustrata e documentata l’intera collezione di medaglie di lava posseduta dall'Osservatorio Vesuviano, insieme alle informazioni relative ad ogni singolo oggetto che la compone. La collezione è oggi resa disponibile alla onsultazione ed alla fruizione informata e consapevole, anche da parte di un pubblico composto non necessariamente da esperti. L’analisi della storia recente del Vesuvio ha permesso di trovare ogni possibile elemento di correlazione tra l’attività del vulcano e la produzione delle medaglie di lava. La collezione, custodita nel più antico osservatorio vulcanologico al mondo, è parte di un ricchissimo patrimonio di interesse scientifico, storico e artistico. La collezione, sinora non fruibile a causa della frammentarietà delle informazioni relative ai singoli pezzi che la compongono, rappresenta un’importante traccia della vita che si sviluppava intorno al vulcano, attesta il tipo di attività eruttiva del Vesuvio all’epoca della produzione delle medaglie, e costituisce una testimonianza unica al mondo nel suo genere. Infatti, non esistono collezioni simili a questa se non, in parte, nel Museo di Mineralogia dell’Università Federico II di Napoli. Questa unicità fu già colta in passato da quegli uomini che si impegnarono a reperire e raggruppare molti di questi esemplari, che spesso rendevano testimonianza di vicende storiche, culturali e artistiche di particolare rilievo per l’area napoletana. La produzione delle medaglie era però strettamente connessa con la disponibilità di lava fluida e facilmente lavorabile che, tuttavia, non veniva prodotta con continuità dal Vesuvio nel corso della sua storia recente. La riorganizzazione sistematica dell’intera collezione viene presentata in questo articolo e consente di mostrare uno spaccato nella storia dell’Osservatorio Vesuviano, del Vesuvio e dei numerosi eventi che hanno segnato la storia del territorio partenopeo. In this paper the Osservatorio Vesuviano collection of lava medals is presented and described as a whole, along with the information regarding each component item, making available this cultural heritage also to a non-specialists public. Moreover, the recent history of Vesuvius has been analyzed in order to find any possible element of correlation between the eruptive activity of the volcano and the production of lava medals. The collection, kept in the oldest volcano observatory in the world, is part of a much wider and very rich cultural estate of great scientific, artistic and historical interest. The collection, which has never been exposed due to lack of information on the component items, represents an important account of the life around the volcano and an invaluable record of a three-centuries long history of Vesuvius activity. It is also an almost unique collection, as the only other similar one is presently exposed at the Mineralogical Museum of the Federico II University of Naples. The uniqueness of this collection was already understood by early collectors, which mainly grouped the samples that celebrated historical, cultural and artistic events of that time. However the production of medals has been always strongly conditioned by the availability of fluid flows of lava, which can be easily sampled and moulded but not continuously produced by the volcano. A new systematic organization and classification of the medals is presented in this paper allowing the description of many aspects of the history of Vesuvius and its volcanological observatory, and the timing of many events that characterized the life of the Parthenopaean interland.

Description: Published

Description: 1-70

Description: 3.10. Storia ed archeologia applicate alle Scienze della Terra

Description: N/A or not JCR

Description: open