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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.

"Historia magistra vitae"-History is life's teacher. Back in the 1st century BCE, Cicero knew well what he meant: lessons gleaned from past events can help decipher contemporary occurrences. Today, these wise words resonate more than ever, given our urge to portray concurrent hazards and forecast oncoming events. As a succession of recurring manifestations and their long-term, far-reaching repercussions over time and space, the history of humans and the Earth system informs-and should help guidecontemporary societies and stakeholders as a collective, shared knowledge inheritance. The earth sciences, bridging natural and social disciplines, constitute premier tools to help provide insight into the global, crucial remit. Born to initially decipher an elusive, distant past, they embrace masses and forces, processes and shapes, and straddle foundational factors: not just those identified by Aristotle (Earth, Water, Air, and Fire), but rather those that nurture life, or that imperil it. Strategic knowledge of the natural past is thus an indispensable 'survival kit' for today and tomorrow's challenges, encompassing the social, human, and economic dimensions. Today's echoes of Cicero's maxim indeed prove far more complex than in past centuries, since the Earth system is being burdened by exceptional environmental stressors over a peaking global population. Economic and societal contradictions also play a role, as regions of the world that have inherited accumulated vulnerabilities exposed to hazards with evolving spatial and temporal patterns, resulting in remarkable effects on human health. Yet, the complexities of human life, if dismaying, are neither new nor truly surprising. Since global societies exhibit complexities that span geographies and economies, and strain human perceptions, knitting together knowledge and societal advancement requires dedicated, sensitive science, where intellect and intelligence are summoned to foster the most revealing human accomplishments: understanding, sharing, and protecting.

Offshore earthquakes can cause widespread destruction due to directly propagating seismic vibrations and/or the generation of tsunamis. Early warning of offshore earthquakes is vital, but their location complicates identification of clear early warning (EW) signatures. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), applied to offshore fibre-optic cables offers the prospect to improve early warning of offshore events. We use a DAS dataset acquired from a 30 km submarine cable spanning a complex bathymetry, offshore Sicily, to contribute to a proof-of-concept using five regional earthquakes to investigate factors impacting incident body wave detection capabilities. We demonstrate observations for P- and S-waves incident parallel and perpendicular to the cable, and that cable coupling to the surrounding medium exerts far more control on signal quality than incidence azimuth. Compared to the nearest land station, an EW signal for a Mw5.8 earthquake was triggered 1.59 seconds earlier using P-wave arrivals on the fibre, and 3.89 seconds earlier using S-waves. We show that effective warnings can be made despite spatially decimating data by factors of 10 and 100 for P-waves and S-waves, respectively. This data volume reduction allows DAS on legacy seafloor cables to be integrated with EW systems for offshore earthquakes and other geohazards which threaten coastal populations.

During the last 5 million years (Pliocene–Holocene), the Earth climate system has undergone a series of marked changes, including (i) the shift from the Pliocene warm state to the Pleistocene cold state with the intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation; (ii) the evolution of the frequency, magnitude, and shape of glacial–interglacial cycles at the Early Middle Pleistocene Transition (∼ 1.25–0.65 Ma); and (iii) the appearance of millennial-scale climate variability. While much of this paleoclimate narrative has been reconstructed from marine records, relatively little is known about the impact of these major changes on terrestrial environments and biodiversity, resulting in a significant gap in the knowledge of a fundamental component of the Earth system. Long, continuous, highly resolved, and chronologically well-constrained terrestrial records are needed to fill this gap, but they are extremely rare. To evaluate the potential of the Fucino Basin, central Italy, for a deep-drilling project in the framework of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), 42 scientists from 14 countries and 32 institutions met in Gioia dei Marsi, central Italy, on 24–27 October 2023 for the ICDP-supported MEME (the longest continuous terrestrial archive in the MEditerranean recording the last 5 Million years of Earth system history) workshop. The existing information and unpublished data presented and reviewed during the workshop confirmed that the Fucino Basin fulfils all the main requisites for improving our understanding of the mode and tempo of the Plio-Quaternary climatic–environmental evolution in a terrestrial setting at different spatial and temporal scales. Specifically, the combination of the seismic line evidence with geochronological and multi-proxy data for multiple sediment cores consolidated the notion that the Fucino Basin infill (i) is constituted by a sedimentary lacustrine succession continuously spanning at least 3.5 Myr; (ii) has a high sensitivity as a paleo-environmental–paleoclimatic proxy; and (iii) contains a rich tephra record that allows us to obtain an independent, high-resolution timescale based on tephrochronology. Considering the typical halfgraben, wedge-shaped geometry of the basin, four different potential drilling targets were identified: MEME-1, located in the middle of the basin, should reach the base of the Quaternary infill at ∼ 500 m depth; MEME-2, located west of MEME-1, has sedimentation rates that are lower, with the base of the Pliocene–Quaternary at ∼ 600 m depth; MEME-3b has the same target as MEME-2 but is located further west, where the base of the Pliocene–Quaternary should be reached at ∼ 300 m; and MEME-3a (∼ 200–300 m depth) is located, for tectonic purposes, on the footwall of the basin master fault. Overall, the MEME workshop sets the basis for widening the research team and defining the scientific perspectives and methodological approaches of the project, from geophysical exploration to the development of an independent chronology and to the acquisition of multi-proxy records, which will contribute to the preparation of the full MEME proposal.