Activities at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology are always in full swing and this month of May has also seen our agenda full of appointments. And, among them, I would like to highlight those in which the encounter with civil society makes our activity as researchers full and tangible.
We have inaugurated the new INGV portal, a necessary and constantly evolving restyling to transmit the Institute's most important information. The slide show highlights the most interesting news produced by the three Departments for the Environment, Earthquakes and Volcanoes and then, immediately after, the "real-time data" from our monitoring systems and the news we publish from day to day. A space dedicated to our editorial production, traditional and social. In short, a portal to navigate.
But the activity of the Institute has seen us protagonists on many fronts of scientific dissemination.
First of all, ScienzAperta, the event created by INGV in 2011 to bring young people into the heart of our laboratories. But all the appointments and emotions experienced this year can be read later in this newsletter.
Instead, there are two appointments at Forum PA 2019: the conference "Cantieri di Casa Italia" organized in collaboration with the Casa Italia Department of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the appointment with the National Forum of CUGs, which also includes the INGV, to create public value through equal opportunities in the public administration.
And then, the Science Festival, this year dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci, which saw the Institute as the protagonist with conferences and workshops to lead visitors to discover this year's theme: the invention, retracing - among other - a journey along two thousand years with the theories on earthquakes, attempts to predict them and the tools designed by man to study them and to defend themselves.
In Genoa, on the other hand, we took part in the Festival del Mare, discussing the main seismic events that took place in the sea around our peninsula and the characteristics of the numerous submarine volcanoes in the Mediterranean, such as the famous Marsili.
The importance of interdisciplinarity was highlighted with the study day in San Felice al Circeo on the discovery of the Neanderthal skull. Indeed, thanks to decades of research by the INGV, geoarchaeologists have had the tools to date the famous skull found in Grotta Guattari in 1939 to even more distant times than those believed up to now.
We've taken the science conversations beyond academic venues with the nationwide Pint of Science Festival. In a pub, in front of a good mug of beer, researchers from the Vesuvius Observatory and the Etnean Observatory answered the most curious questions from the public by telling the news of geophysical research.
The visit of the Irish Ambassador Ó Floinn honored the memory of Robert Mallet, pioneer of seismology, whose story and extraordinary research on the Val d'Agri earthquake of 1857 were transposed into a passionate comic strip by Giuseppe Palumbo.
And, to conclude this long excursus in our dissemination activities, the INGV hosted the teachers and students of the University of Geneva in the Operational Centers of Stromboli and Vulcano for a training course on volcanic risk which ended in the operations room of Vulcano "Marcello Carapezza" with a simulation of volcanic emergency management.
In closing, I cannot fail to mention two extremely qualifying events for the effectiveness of scientific research.
The first is the memorandum of understanding signed with the Carabinieri. Through the installation of seismic stations within the existing barracks of Italy, we will achieve optimal coverage of the territory in seismic, volcanic and environmental monitoring and surveillance, significantly improving the effectiveness of the networks for the study and emergency intervention on the whole national territory.
The second is the implementing agreement of the agreement entered into with the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) in coordination with the regional Environmental Protection Agencies (ARPA), to carry out hydrogeochemical monitoring in Italy, with the The goal is to set up the National Geochemical Observatory at the INGV section of Palermo.
Finally, among the many recent publications by INGV, worthy of note is the Italian version of the European macroseismic scale EMS-98 (European Macroseismic Scale) 21 years after the publication of the original English version. The EMS-98 scale, which replaced the traditional MCS (Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg) and MSK (Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik) scales, is now a point of reference also in national regulations on seismic risk, such as parameters for anti-seismic adaptation works of buildings.
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