Forty years ago, at 19:34 on 23 November 1980, the strongest Italian earthquake of the last 100 years of magnitude 6.9 shook Irpinia: about 3000 victims and 280.000 displaced. An enormous damage in terms of social and economic disintegration, which also led to a demographic decline in those areas and a cost of over 50 billion euros. It was an event that radically changed scientific research and stimulated the right response of the State under the strong words of President Sandro Pertini: thanks to the intuition and determination of the Hon. Giuseppe Zamberletti, the National Civil Protection was born.
An earthquake is always a scientific experiment that allows us more and more to increase our knowledge of the mechanisms that generate it and the associated phenomenologies. From 1980 to today, Italy has grown enormously in terms of scientific activities and infrastructures: it has a much more widespread seismic and accelerometric network; the finalized projects Geodynamics and CROP (Deep CROsta) were born; after a few years the RING (National Integrated Network GPS) was developed; in 1999 5 separate institutes merged to generate the current INGV.
Thousands of scientific articles have led to an extraordinary growth in our knowledge of the Earth and Italian geology. The national hydrogeochemical network is being born, the culture of seismic prevention is spreading, even if the road is still long, but a new course has begun because we know that earthquakes will return to where they occurred in the past and also in those areas where current seismotectonic information confirms similar structural conditions even if no historical seismic events are known. We have ambitious goals: to continuously increase and update the observational networks, to adopt new monitoring tools such as optical fibres, to use the analytical techniques of artificial intelligence, to reconstruct the structure of the crust and mantle in 3D under Italy and its seas, to study seismic precursors, produce increasingly updated and useful seismic hazard maps for prevention. The Earth is a living planet and seismicity is one of the various forms in which it expresses its beating heart. We have to make peace with our planet, get to know it better in order to know how to respect the rules.
INGV has returned to the territories hit by the earthquake to give a new voice to the protagonists and tell with new words and images an event that has left a mark in the history of Italy.
With a site entirely dedicated to earthquake80.ingv.it, we wanted to represent science, memory and testimonies. What happened in the Campania-Lucan Apennines in 1980? What answers did the science of the time give? What did that dramatic event offer the scientific community for the study of earthquakes? This and much more on the site, as well as an entirely INGV production in the docuFilm “Irpinia80 – Journey to the land that resists”, by Marco Cirilli e presented to the public as part of the busy calendar of appointments organized by the Institute to commemorate the event, which brought together scientists, institutions, historians, communicators and civil protection experts around the same virtual table.
And it is precisely from the top of the national Civil Protection that the story of the INGVNewsletter starts again, with the interview with the Head of Department Angelo Borrelli, who explores the themes that, in a transversal way, unite many realities of Italy and of our research: from the awareness and from the study of the natural risks to which our territory is exposed, to the daily diffusion among citizens of the culture of civil protection.
To recall, once again, how much the Irpinia earthquake marked an epochal passage in the history of Italian seismology, Professor Roberto Scarpa, Full Professor of Solid Earth Geophysics at the University of Salerno and INGV Board Member, recounted the 1980 earthquake from his point of view as a witness and refined scientist, retracing the stages that led - from that moment on - to the implementation and development of the national seismic surveillance system.
From one side of the Atlantic to the other, this month we have reached the coasts bathed by the Caribbean Sea, especially those of the Lesser Antilles, to discover the volcanic nature of Guadeloupe and Martinique, with their volcanoes protagonists of eruptions which, in the past, they have upset the economic and social structure of the local populations.
Furthermore, INGV participates in the ESOPIANETI project of the Italian Space Agency and the National Institute of Astrophysics, contributing its knowledge of volcanic rocks and minerals for the study of extraterrestrial rocks and meteorites, to support the interpretation of data from space missions.
Rocks which, if taken from core drilling carried out deep inside our caves, can also help in the reconstruction of climatic variations of the past, up to hundreds of thousands of years ago: this is what the Paleoclimatology Laboratory of the Pisa Section deals with, we visited to learn about some of the tools and analytical techniques that allow us to read the paleoclimate starting from the study of the growth levels of the mineral deposits.
Finally, a large body also needs a legal guide of the many activities in which it is called to operate. In the "management" section, the theme of research is addressed with respect to the numerous implications that the work of researchers and technicians can have from an administrative point of view in a research institute which, in addition to being an important scientific center for the nation, represents at the same time a key player in the Public Administration.
Enjoy the reading!