Marco Giardino

Ice Loss and Slope Stability in High-Mountain Regions

The present time is one significant stage in the adjustment of mountain slopes to climate change, and specifically atmospheric warming. This review examines the state of understanding of the responses of mid-latitude alpine landscapes to recent cryospheric change, and summarizes the variety and complexity of documented landscape responses involving glaciers, moraines, rock and debris slopes, and rock glaciers. These indicate how a common general forcing translates into varied site-specific slope responses according to material structures and properties, thermal and hydrological environments, process rates, and prior slope histories. Warming of permafrost in rock and debris slopes has demonstrably increased instability, manifest as rock glacier acceleration, rock falls, debris flows, and related phenomena. Changes in glacier geometry influence stress fields in rock and debris slopes, and some failures appear to be accelerating toward catastrophic failure. Several sites now require expensive monitoring and modeling to design effective risk-reduction strategies, especially where new lakes as multipliers of hazard potential form, and new activities and infrastructure are developed.

Fragments of the Western Alpine Chain as Historic Ornamental Stones in Turin (Italy): Enhancement of Urban Geological Heritage through Geotourism

In Piemonte, stone has always been the most widely used raw material for buildings, characterizing the architectural identity of the city of Turin. All kinds of rocks, metamorphic, igneous, and sedimentary, are represented, including gneisses, marbles, granitoids, and, less commonly, limestones. The great variety of ornamental stones is clearly due to the highly composite geological nature of the Piemonte region related to the presence of the orogenic Alpine chain and the sedimentary Tertiary Piemonte Basin. This paper provides a representative list of the most historic ornamental stones of Piemonte, which have been used over the centuries in buildings and architecture. The main stones occurring in Turin have been identified and described from a petrographic and mineralogical point of view in order to find out the corresponding geological units and quarry sites, from which they were exploited. This allows the associated cultural and scientific interest of stones to be emphasized in the architecture of a town which lies between a mountain chain and a hilly region.

Quaternary glaciations in the western Italian Alps – a review

This chapter discusses the methods by which the extent of the last glacial maximum (LGM) in the Western Alps has been determined. In the general overview of the Alpine glaciation, the ice sheet extended continuously all along the Western Alps, leaving only the highest peaks emerging, tapered, and branched to the South, disappearing in the Maritime Alps. The total obliteration of glacial landforms, both depositional and erosional, is commonly observed. In the middle Val Sesia, a morainic amphitheatre originally existed at the valley opening, where the town of Borgosesia is situated today. Modern fluvial erosion has removed most of this moraine except for a few relict landforms that are aligned transverse to the valley axis. At the junction of the three Lanzo valleys, it is impossible to determine where the LGM glacier terminated because the relating landforms and deposits have been erased.

Digital Tools for Collection, Promotion and Visualisation of Geoscientific Data: Case Study of Seguret Valley (Piemonte, NW Italy)

The work presented here forms part of a cultural and scientific context for the continuous improvement of computer sciences to support geological and geomorphological research, by allowing the development and application of specific tools and innovative methodologies. Cooperation between the Regional Museum of Natural Sciences of Torino and the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Torino has facilitated the development and implementation of a methodology aimed at the identification and evaluation of the geological and geomorphological heritage of the Piemonte region. The methodological steps applied are described in full in a case study of Seguret Valley (Piemonte, NW Italy). The employment of geomatic tools, such as digital photogrammetry, geographical information systems (GIS) and global navigation satellite system (GNSS), has allowed the production of a geomorphological map of the area and the identification, listing and selection of the most representative and important sites. Terrestrial laser scanner (LiDAR), although currently used for demonstration purposes, has the potential to be used in the identification of potential risks associated with the enjoyment of the site by the public. Web Mapping tools based on GoogleMaps© architecture have also been set up for the web dissemination of geoscientific information—appropriately simplified without prejudicing accuracy—in enable as broad an audience as possible to be reached.

A Selection of Geological Tours for Promoting the Italian Geological Heritage in the Secondary Schools

Twenty Italian geological tours have been selected and studied for creating a didactic multimedia product devoted to secondary schools. The aim is to enhance the knowledge of the Italian geological heritage, starting from teachers and students, through the proposal of virtual geological tours. Particular attention has been given both to the relevance of Earth Sciences in everyday life and to the multidisciplinary topics proposed, having care of such aspects as the use of the land and the prevention of natural resources from degradation. An emotional approach has been applied because emotions are essential to stimulate curiosity and to build affection towards a territory, for raising the awareness of the value of the geological heritage. The project required collaboration among researchers, professionals, associations, and institutions involved in studying, protecting, and promoting the Italian geological heritage. Moreover, a further collaboration with teachers and students is foreseen, in order to test the effectiveness of the product in the teaching/learning process. The feedback collected will be useful for realizing a new multimedia product on the geosites of the Piemonte Region, as an output of the multidisciplinary PROactive management of GEOlogical heritage in the Piemonte region (PROGEO-Piemonte) research project.

A web-based, relational database for studying glaciers in the Italian Alps

Glaciers are among the best terrestrial indicators of climate change and thus glacier inventories have attracted a growing, worldwide interest in recent years. In Italy, the first official glacier inventory was completed in 1925 and 774 glacial bodies were identified. As the amount of data continues to increase, and new techniques become available, there is a growing demand for computer tools that can efficiently manage the collected data. The Research Institute for Geo-hydrological Protection of the National Research Council, in cooperation with the Departments of Computer Science and Earth Sciences of the University of Turin, created a database that provides a modern tool for storing, processing and sharing glaciological data. The database was developed according to the need of storing heterogeneous information, which can be retrieved through a set of web search queries. The databases architecture is server-side, and was designed by means of an open source software. The website interface, simple and intuitive, was intended to meet the needs of a distributed public: through this interface, any type of glaciological data can be managed, specific queries can be performed, and the results can be exported in a standard format. The use of a relational database to store and organize a large variety of information about Italian glaciers collected over the last hundred years constitutes a significant step forward in ensuring the safety and accessibility of such data. Moreover, the same benefits also apply to the enhanced operability for handling information in the future, including new and emerging types of data formats, such as geographic and multimedia files. Future developments include the integration of cartographic data, such as base maps, satellite images and vector data. The relational database described in this paper will be the heart of a new geographic system that will merge data, data attributes and maps, leading to a complete description of Italian glacial environments.

Methods for Assessing Geodiversity

Abstract The assessment of geodiversity can be made with qualitative, quantitative and qualitative–quantitative methods. Qualitative methods have a descriptive character and are suitable for nominal and ordinal data. Quantitative methods are based on a set of parameters and indicators to determine a geodiversity index of a certain area. Qualitative–quantitative methods result in a combination of quantitative (i.e., digital) and cause-effect data (i.e., relational and explanatory). At the current stage of development, qualitative–quantitative methods are the most advanced and the ones offering more reliable results. Their main advantage is the integration of data from different sources and with different content and their wide use within geographic information systems, both at the stage of data collection and data integration, as well as during numerical processing and output presentation. The limitation of these methods is related to difficulties concerning the validation of results. The development of qualitative–quantitative methods associated with cognitive issues should be expected in the near future, oriented towards ontology and the Semantic Web.

Mechanisms linking active rock glaciers and impounded surface water formation in high-mountain areas

Rock glaciers are slowly flowing mixtures of debris and ice occurring in mountains. They can represent a reservoir of water, and melting ice inside them can affect surface water hydrochemistry. Investigating the interactions between rock glaciers and water bodies is therefore necessary to better understand these mechanisms. With this goal, we elucidate the hydrology and structural setting of a rock glacier-marginal pond system, providing new insights into the mechanisms linking active rock glaciers and impounded surface waters. This was achieved through the integration of waterborne geophysical techniques (ground penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography and self-potentials) and heat tracing. Results of these surveys showed that rock glacier advance has progressively filled the valley depression where the pond is located, creating a dam that could have modified the level of impounded water. A sub-surface hydrological window connecting the rock glacier to the pond was also detected, where an inflow of cold and mineralised underground waters from the rock glacier was observed. Here, greater water contribution from the rock glacier occurred following intense precipitation events during the ice-free season, with concomitant increasing electrical conductivity values. The outflowing dynamic of the pond is dominated by a sub-surface seepage where a minor fault zone in bedrock was found, characterised by altered and highly-fractured rocks. The applied approach is evaluated here as a suitable technique for investigating logistically-complex hydrological settings which could be possibly transferred to wider scales of investigation.

The Classification Scheme of the Piemonte Geological Map and the OntoGeonous initiative

The OntoGeonous initiative has the goal of modeling a number of interconnected computational ontologies of geological concepts in order to exploit (i) the expressive power of ontological systems to merge several geological concepts (ii) the reasoning capabilities of the ontological systems to check the consistency of the currently existing knowledge stored in the Data Base of the Piemonte Geological Map at 1:250.000 scale and to infer novel knowledge.The prospect application of this initiative is the intelligent data collection and compilation of geological data base and the provision of sound semantic foundations for a modern cartographic project that provides a basis for a synthesis of geological data at the regional scale.

The Ivrea Morainic Amphitheatre as a Well Preserved Record of the Quaternary Climate Variability (PROGEO-Piemonte Project, NW Italy)

In the Piedmont plain of NW Italy the Ivrea Morainic Amphitheatre (IMA) is a remarkable evidence of the Quaternary glaciations. It consists of a wide (505 km2) complex of lateral moraines (i.e. the Serra d’Ivrea), end moraines and kame terraces, encircling a 200 km2 wide flat internal depression above which a subglacially moulded rocky hills (the Colli d’Ivrea) elevates. The glacigenic succession ranges from the end of the Early Pleistocene (dated on palaeomagnetic basis) to the end of the Late Pleistocene (14C radiometric and 10Be exposure ages) (about 900–20 ky BP). The IMA has recently been parted into ten stratigraphical units, potentially correlable to the whole sequence of the main Quaternary glaciations recorded by the marine oxygen isotope stratigraphy. Natural (glacigenic deposits and forms) and archaeological (i.e. the Roman gold mines) features make the IMA a very interesting topic for a multidisciplinary research with educational, cultural and tourist purposes. Some recent and present activities for the land promoting are presented. A candidature to the UNESCO global geopark network is considered as a suitable and ambitious goal.