The year 2007 is the 150 anniversary of the Great Neapolitan Earthquake which on 16 December 1857 struck a vast region of the Southern Italy and was centred in the Val d’Agri (Agri River valley), one of the largest basins of the Apennines mountain chain. The earthquake effects were promptly studied by Robert Mallett, an Irish engineer who published an extensive report considered a landmark in the modern Seismology [Mallet, R., 1862. The great Neapolitan earthquake of 1857. The first principles of observational seismology. Chapman and Hill (Publ.), London].
Although this earthquake is one of the largest (M~7) in the national seismic catalogue, the location and geometry of the causative fault are object of a warm debate which has blazed in the last years within the scientific community. The qu?relle is not limited to the identification of the seismogenic sources in the Val d’Agri area but, obviously, imbues models of the Quaternary tectonic evolution of the area.
Taking the occasion of this recurrence, the Universit? degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) and the Istituto di Metodologie per l’Analisi Ambientale del CNR (CNR-IMAA) in Tito (Potenza), with the contribution of the Universit? della Basilicata at Potenza, have promoted a three-day meeting in the Val d’Agri with the aim of discussing field evidences and models for active tectonics in the area.
We will spend the first day in introducing and discussing the next two days field-trip, devoted to the eastern and the western shoulders of the high reach of the basin, respectively.
The purpose is to bring scientists with a broad range of expertise all together for showing results on multidisciplinary researches carried out in the area, in order to approach the active tectonics of the Val d’Agri from as different and wide angles as possible.
We hope a multidisciplinary approach involving extensive geological, geomorphological and geophysical studies of active faulting will help shed light on the particularly difficult case of the Val d’Agri and, more in general, to active deformation in the Southern Apennines.
Comitato Organizzatore
Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra - Universit? degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia – Roma
CNR-IMAA, Tito Scalo (PZ)
in collaborazione con
Universit? della Basilicata, Potenza