The month of June contains the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, an event that transports the days from one season to another, where the sowing of spring finds its fruits in the fields of summer. Our June 2019 was also intense and, like the "door" of the summer solstice, we remembered the past, renewed the present, sowed the future.
Remembered the past:
With an intense day in L'Aquila, Saturday June 15th we remembered the seismic event of April 6th 2009 which devastated Abruzzo. Researchers and professionals from all over Italy discussed what we have learned, the activities of the time and what we could do today in a similar experience. This is because current scientific knowledge is the natural evolution of past events and the themes of Apennine seismicity, prevention, anti-seismic legislation and reconstruction have been tackled with the necessary awareness that we can always do better and that we must never let our guard down on raising social awareness of the fragility of our land.
A land which, for example, from its volcanoes is the dispenser of the black gold of obsidian. Our Palermo Section, in fact, took part in a workshop that immersed us in the depths of the Mediterranean, to discover the geological deposits of black stone which constituted a very important instrument of commercial exchange since the most ancient eras of civilization, constituting above all mold for the creativity of artists.
Finally, the past is the protagonist of seismic historiography. In fact, the INGV website has published the Catalog of Severe Earthquakes in Italy and in the Mediterranean area online, which allows the reader to move backwards through the parameters of each individual earthquake up to reading the original sources that made its study possible. . A precious collection of over twelve hundred Italian earthquakes between 461 BC and 1997.
Renewed the present:
There is no doubt that the web and social media represent a fast and immediate means of wide-ranging communication. During 2018, INGV inaugurated the @INGVterremoti Twitter channel dedicated to the automatic localization of earthquakes in real time. A largely positive experience that led us to develop the same application on the web as well. In fact, since 19 June, the INGV website has been publishing the preliminary automatic localizations of earthquakes with a magnitude equal to or greater than 3 in real time, together with the communication sent by our Seismic Surveillance Room to the Civil Protection Department. A service to citizens that is increasingly part of the desire to make scientific research and monitoring of the territory feel like instruments of knowledge close to people.
The marine environment, then, was the object of a two-day study of the Italian seas and beyond, on gas emissions, on the seismicity detected by ocean bottom seismometer, on the chemical-physical variations of the parameters of the water column, on submerged volcanoes, on the crustal structure and on many other topics.
Sowed the future:
In the Castle of Melfi and under the aegis of "Matera, European capital of culture", INGV took part in the training of the "citizen of the future", bringing together high school students technology and risk awareness.
On the island of Ischia we have inaugurated the Geological Section of the Pithecusae Museum. A flagship in the green island that will lead visitors to discover the power of nature and volcanoes in a specially dedicated space of the enchanting Villa Arbusto.
We dedicated ourselves to the little explorers of the Kidsbit Festival in Perugia where our researchers led the public to discover the cause-effect relationships between the phenomenon of global warming and the melting of glaciers and accompanied the visitors in the "VR Experience", a suggestive journey inside the crater of a volcano made possible by augmented reality.
With the "Agua Futura" program of the Italian Agency for Cooperation and Development, INGV has offered its expertise on seismic, volcanic and tsunami risks, both in peacetime and in emergencies, to a multidisciplinary team from the faculties of medicine, psychology and engineering from the University of El Salvador.
Finally, INGV has acquired what will be the new headquarters of the Pisa Section, where good science can be done and "watered" by new generations of researchers.
This is INGV, operational for twenty years, but with the experience of millennia of the Earth's history.