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A digital low power pulse compressed ionosonde was developed at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome, Italy. The aim of this Advanced Ionospheric Sounder, AIS-INGV, is to reduce the transmitted power and, consequently, weight, size, power consumption and hardware complexity. To compensate the power reduction the most advanced HF radar techniques such as the pulse compression and a phase coherent integration are used. The ionosonde is completely programmable and a PC supports the data acquisition, control, storage and on-line processing. The first prototype was installed at Gibilmanna Ionospheric Observatory (Sicily), an interesting location in the center of Mediterranean area. The new ionosonde will contribute to ionospheric database and real time knowledge of South European ionospheric conditions for space weather applications. In this work the first results (ionograms and autoscaled characteristics) are presented and briefly discussed.

A new digital ionosonde called AIS-INGV (Advanced Ionospheric Sounder) was designed both for research and for routine service of HF radio wave propagation forecast. Nearly the entire system was developed in the Laboratorio di Geofisica Ambientale at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome. It exploits advanced techniques for signal analysis, recent technological devices and PC resources. This paper describes design concepts and performance of the new ionosonde.

The Italian Ionospheric Antarctic Observatory of Terra Nova Bay (74.70S, 164.11E) was recently equipped with the AIS-INGV ionosonde developed at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome, (Italy). This paper aims to describe briefly which are the main characteristics of the instrument and show the good quality and reliability of the recorded ionograms.

The ionosonde is a system which exploits the radar technique: it applies electromagnetic waves with variable frequency in the HF band to measure the ionospheric layers electron density, height and other parameters. This paper is a technical report on the new digital ionosonde (AIS-INGV), which was designed both for research purposes and for the routine service of the HF radiowave propagation forecast. It has been developed almost completely within the Laboratorio di Geofisica Ambientale (LGA) at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV). It exploits advanced techniques for the signal analysis, recent technological devices and PC resources. The report is divided into two parts; the first is a general description of the design development, the second is a more detailed description of the blocks and circuits actually built and tested, directed to a specialist reader.

www.earth-prints.org aims to satisfy the increasing demand of fast, up-to-date, easy-accessible, and free-of-charge sources of information in all branches of Geosciences. It allows earth scientists to deposit electronic documents into its collections and to index them by subjects and keywords. Earth-prints provides a time-stamp to all deposited materials to insure precedence rights to original ideas and scientific results. It deals with copyright issues through Creative Common standards that offer a wide variety of licenses. All deposited material is made immediately available to the public. Subscribers will be sent a daily newsletter according to the topics they have signed in. The archive has a three-level hierarchical structure. The top level includes Atmosphere, Cryosphere, Hydrosphere, Solid Earth, and General. It then branches into several disciplines within the other two levels. Different collections take in different kinds of material, such as pre-prints, oral presentations, extended abstracts, published papers, conference papers, books and book chapters, posters, and Web products and databases. Earth-Prints main language is English but it accepts documents in other languages also, giving visibility to data and studies at local scale that are indeed of general interests. An abstract in English is always required. We will present a virtual tour into the many features of Earth-prints to provide all its potential users with an easy acquaintance of the system and make them explore its capabilities. Although the archive is based on latest information technology it requires no specific knowledge to be used because it manages all procedures for access, navigation, upload of documents and information retrieval through a user-friendly interface. What is the limit of open archive development? We think that the one and only limit of open archives is the eagerness of its users to share information and knowledge.

We set up a computational tool to numerically model static and quasi-static deformation generated by faulting sources embedded in plane or spherical domains. We use a Finite Element (FE) approach to automatically implement arbitrary faulting sources and calculate displacement and stress fields induced by slip on the fault. The package makes use of the capabilities of CalculiX, a non commercial FE software designed to solve field problems (see for details), and is freely distributed by request.

The historical sources of large and moderate earthquakes, earthquake catalogues and monographs exist in many depositories in Syria and European centers. They have been studied, and the detailed review and analysis resulted in a catalogue with 181 historical earthquakes from 1365 B.C. to 1900 A.D. Numerous original documents in Arabic, Latin, Byzantine and Assyrian allowed us to identify seismic events not mentioned in previous works. In particular, detailed descriptions of damage in Arabic sources provided quantitative information necessary to re-evaluate past seismic events. These large earthquakes (I0>VIII) caused considerable damage in cities, towns and villages located along the northern section of the Dead Sea fault system. Fewer large events also occurred along the Palmyra, Ar-Rassafeh and the Euphrates faults in Eastern Syria. Descriptions in original sources document foreshocks, aftershocks, fault ruptures, liquefaction, landslides, tsunamis, fires and other damages. We present here an updated historical catalogue of 181 historical earthquakes distributed in 4 categories regarding the originality and other considerations, we also present a table of the parametric catalogue of 36 historical earthquakes (table I) and a table of the complete list of all historical earthquakes (181 events) with the affected locality names and parameters of information quality and completeness (table II) using methods already applied in other regions (Italy, England, Iran, Russia) with a completeness test using EMS-92. This test suggests that the catalogue is relatively complete for magnitudes >6.5. This catalogue may contribute to a comprehensive and unified parametric earthquake catalogue and to a realistic assessment of seismic hazards in Syria and surrounding regions.

This book contains the proceedings of the 1st WSEAS International Conference on Environmental and Geological Science and Engineering (EG'08) which was held in Malta, September 11-13, 2008. This conference aims to disseminate the latest research and applications in Renewable Energy, Mineral Resources, Natural Hazards and Risks, Environmental Impact Assessment, Urban and Regional Planning Issues, Remote Sensing and GIS, and other relevant topics and applications. The friendliness and openness of the WSEAS conferences, adds to their ability to grow by constantly attracting young researchers. The WSEAS Conferences attract a large number of well-established and leading researchers in various areas of Science and Engineering as you can see from http://www.wseas.org/reports. Your feedback encourages the society to go ahead as you can see in http://www.worldses.org/feedback.htm The contents of this Book are also published in the CD-ROM Proceedings of the Conference. Both will be sent to the WSEAS collaborating indices after the conference: www.worldses.org/indexes In addition, papers of this book are permanently available to all the scientific community via the WSEAS E-Library. Expanded and enhanced versions of papers published in this conference proceedings are also going to be considered for possible publication in one of the WSEAS journals that participate in the major International Scientific Indices (Elsevier, Scopus, EI, ACM, Compendex, INSPEC, CSA .... see: www.worldses.org/indexes) these papers must be of high-quality (break-through work) and a new round of a very strict review will follow. (No additional fee will be required for the publication of the extended version in a journal). WSEAS has also collaboration with several other international publishers and all these excellent papers of this volume could be further improved, could be extended and could be enhanced for possible additional evaluation in one of the editions of these international publishers. Finally, we cordially thank all the people of WSEAS for their efforts to maintain the high scientific level of conferences, proceedings and journals.

This study analyses the representation of the geosciences in Italian and international audiovisual fiction, investigating how films and television series contribute to shaping public perceptions of science, natural hazards, and scientific institutions from an ethical perspective. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates Media Studies, semiotics, ethics, and the sociology of science, the study examines a corpus of Italian and international productions spanning from the twentieth century to the present day. The research is intended as both a methodological and an exploratory contribution, proposing a framework for the analysis of the geosciences in audiovisual fiction and illustrating its application through selected case studies. The findings reveal a significant evolution in narrative models: from the Hollywood tradition, characterized by catastrophism and the figure of the isolated "Cassandra" scientist, to more realistic and institutionally grounded representations in recent Italian productions. Contemporary films and television series increasingly portray the geoscientist as a "competent hero," closely connected to local communities and actively engaged in disaster risk prevention, communication, and management. The study also explores how these narratives may shape the ethics of public engagement with science, contributing to bridge the gap between the scientific community and society while redefining the cultural role of the geosciences in the Anthropocene. Through a dramaturgical analysis of selected films and television series, the study argues that contemporary Italian narratives humanize scientists, promote a culture of prevention, and frame disasters as shared social and cultural challenges rather than as inevitable consequences of natural hazards. This work lays the foundation for future research on the role of audiovisual narratives in fostering prevention, strengthening the ethical communication of geoscientific knowledge, and enhancing dialogue between science and society.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are major drivers of global mean sea level rise and are predicted to continue to do so in the future. However, they also represent the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future sea level rise making robust estimates of observed ice sheet mass changes critical. Here, we compare and combine 42 independent estimates of ice sheet mass balance derived from satellite observations of temporal changes in ice sheet flow, volume, and gravitational attraction to determine the ice sheet mass balance from 1972 (Greenland) and 1979 (Antarctica) until 2023. We then use regional climate models to partition the total mass balance into contributions associated with surface mass balance and ice dynamical imbalance. The ice sheets lost 11,309 ± 565 billion tonnes of ice between 1979 and 2023, with glacier dynamical imbalance driving 84% of the ice loss and surface mass balance the remainder. This dataset can be used to track the contribution of the ice sheets to sea level rise and constrain projections of future sea level rise.

Computing the Love numbers for a general spherically symmetric, self-gravitating viscoelastic model is a classical problem in geodynamics, and is still relevant today in geodesy and planetary science. Indeed, the numerical values of the tidal or loading Love numbers are known to be sensitive to the planetary structure and to the internal rheological layering. Hence, measurements of Love numbers for planetary bodies provide constraints on their internal structure, while viscoelastic Love numbers for realistic Earth models are a key ingredient for modeling the response to the redistribution of hydrological and cryospheric loads. Here we present a novel numerical approach to the solution of viscoelastic field equations, aimed at evaluating Love numbers for spherically symmetric (1−D) planetary structures characterized by linear viscoelastic rheology, both in the time and in the frequency domains. The solution scheme is efficiently implemented in the new Python framework pyALMA4 and benchmarked against reference numerical results based on independently developed numerical tools like LoadDef and ISSM. The pyALMA4 code extends the range of linear rheological laws available to the user and improves upon previous code ALMA3 in terms of efficiency, avoiding expensive multi-precision computations. One major refinement is the introduction of compressibility, which improves the accuracy of the computed Love numbers. The versatility of pyALMA4 is confirmed through two case studies of current interest in planetology, namely the isostatic deformations of the Martian lithosphere forced by fluctuations of the polar caps and the tidal response of the Jovian moon Europa in the presence of a subsurface ocean.

We present a reconstruction of the MIS 5e, MIS 5c, and MIS 5a marine terraces located in the central part of the tectonically uplifted Tyrrhenian Sea coast of central Italy, based on the combination of pedo-morpho-stratigraphical investigations and object-based image analysis (OBIA) applied to a LiDAR-based digital terrain model (DTM). Nine 40Ar/39Ar ages on detrital sanidine provide geochronological constraints to the terraces. Combined paleoecological, sedimentological, and geomorphological analyses precisely characterize paleoecological and bathymetrical conditions allowing us to identify the sea-level indicators and to assess the associated paleo-sea-levels at 39 ± 1, 29 ± 2, and 6.5 ± 1.5 m above present sea-level for the highstands of MIS 5e (MIS 5.5), MIS 5c (MIS 5.3), and MIS 5a (MIS 5.1), respectively. Assuming a global relative sea-level of +5.7 m for MIS 5.5, and a constant local uplift rate since 125 ka, we obtain a local relative sea-level (RSL) of 0 m for MIS 5.3 and − 16.5 m for MIS 5.1. By assessing the regional tectonic and isostatic contributions, we compare the reconstructed sea-level indicators with global estimates based on the conventional regression formulae applied to the δ18O record, highlighting a ∼ +30 and + 15 m misfit. Our results point at a strongly nonlinear relationship between oceanic temperature and ice volume during the transition period from the MIS 5e interglacial to the inception of the subsequent glacial stage.