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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.

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.

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 study focuses on the archaeometric analysis carried out on the stone tesserae constituting the "A Grandi Fiori" Mosaic in "Room N" of the residential area of the Roman Villa at Palazzi di Casignana (Reggio Calabria, Italy). The mosaic, dated to the 3rd century CE, features green and white tesserae arranged in four-petaled floral motifs. A multi-analytical approach was adopted to characterize both the green and white stone tesserae constituting the mosaic. In addition, provenance studies were conducted on the white marble tesserae. Data obtained from mineralogical and petrographic analyses using Polarized Optical Microscopy (POM), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), and Scanning Electron Microscopy coupled with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) were combined. Furthermore, the determination of oxygen and carbon stable isotope compositions (δ 13 C and δ 18 O) through mass spectrometry (MS) was performed on the white marble tesserae. The results from these investigations were compared with the recently updated reference databases of major Mediterranean marbles used in antiquity in order to evaluate their most probable origin. The minero-petrographic investigation revealed the use of a biomicrite for the green tesserae. On the other hand, the petrographic and geochemical analyses of the white tesserae indicate the presence of marbles sourced from various regions, including Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, with a predominant use of Proconnesian marble. The presence of mosaic tesserae sourced from distant Mediterranean areas further underscores the historical significance of the villa and provides new insights into the trade routes of raw materials in ancient Rome. At the same time, the evidence may suggest a possible reuse of marble leftovers, potentially related to the documented phases of structural transformation and renovation of the villa.

This paper presents the results of minero-petrographic and chemical analyses of pottery and potential local raw materials from Ustica, a small volcanic island off the coast of Palermo (Sicily), inhabited during the Middle Neolithic. Typologically, the pottery shows cultural connections to the Bicromica and Serra d'Alto traditions, linking Ustica to Sicily and Southern Italy, as well as to the Late Neolithic Diana pottery from the Aeolian Archipelago. The archaeometric study aims to determine whether the island's inhabitants during the 5th millennium BCE engaged in the exchange of ceramics in addition to obsidian and chert. This research investigates raw material sources, technological knowledge, and pottery-making traditions on the island by analyzing the compositional, textural, and structural characteristics of the ceramic assemblage. The experimental results indicate the use of local raw materials from areas near the archaeological site and provide insights into firing techniques, helping to establish the petrographic and chemical profiles of the ceramics. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of Neolithic pottery production in the central Mediterranean. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This study is to summarize the lesson learned during the July 2024 experimental campaign where targets, consisting of floating plastic and natural debris, were jointly observed in a South Italy lake by drone and satellite instruments. The satellite layer consists of the X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) equipped onboard the Italian Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation (CSG) constellation, while the drone layer consists of an optical camera. A set of multi-polarization features, namely the co- and crosspolarized normalized radar cross section (NRCS), the SPAN and the like-to-cross-polarization ratio, are extracted from the CSG SAR measurements. Their sensitivity to the plastic target, along with their ability to discriminate plastic from natural floating debris, are investigated using objective metrics. Experimental results, obtained under calm water conditions, show that floating plastic calls for co- and cross-polarized signals well-above the system noise and well-distinguishable from the surrounding water using all the features. The plastic target appears as a spot brighter than the surrounding water in both the co- and the cross-polarized NRCS imagery. The co-polarized NRCS calls for the largest plastic-to-water contrast and the largest separation between the plastic and the natural target. However, this separation is such that the discrimination is a challengin

Thermogene/hypogean travertine is generally considered as typical terrestrial carbonate deposits associated with Ca-rich hot springs. In the southern range of the Damavand volcano in northeast Tehran occurs a large volume of travertine (usually referred to as the Ab-e Ask travertine). To investigate these, we present a dataset of major and trace element compositions of the Ab-e Ask travertines. Micro-textural and geochemical studies suggested they are deposited mostly under the control of bacterial activity. Six main travertine lithofacies are recognized: coated‑gas bubbles, crystalline crust, raft travertine, reed travertine, laminated boundstone, and shrub travertine. Diagenetic features suggest that the environment varied from meteoric-vadose, meteoric-phreatic to a phreatic-burial type. Positive values of the Langelier Saturation Index (SI) indicated that the Ab-e Ask springs are supersaturated with respect to calcite. On the PAAS-normalized REEs patterns, most of A and B-type travertines indicate MREE enrichment relative to HREE (TbN/YbN>1), strong negative Ce and Eu anomalies, whereas most of the C-type travertines are enriched in heavy rare earth elements (HREE) relative to the LREE (YbN/SmN>1), with a flatter HREE patterns and prominent negative Ce and Eu anomalies. A depletion in LREE relative to MREE and HREE in the Ab-e Ask travertines is considered to be as a result of the difference in geochemical mobility between LREEs and HREEs during deep water–rock interaction, while the MREE enrichment compared to HREE is interpreted to indicate inheritance from reservoir/aquifer rocks. Negative Eu and Ce anomalies indicate that the Ab-e Ask travertines is deposited from low-temperature hydrothermal waters in oxic-anoxic environmental conditions.δ18O values and the calculated values of δ13C(CO2) indicated that these travertines are deposited from hydrothermal fluids with a mixture of mantle and crustal CO2. Geological observations and isotopic analysis obtained in this work are corresponds to a thermogenic origin. This work shows that the depositional environment of the Ab-e Ask travertine is influenced by water-rock interactions.