Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, Hannover, Germany

We present Bedmap2, a new suite of gridded products describing surface elevation, ice-thickness and the seafloor and subglacial bed elevation of the Antarctic south of 60 S. We derived these products using data from a variety of sources, including many substantial surveys completed since the original Bedmap compilation (Bedmap1) in 2001. In particular, the Bedmap2 ice thickness grid is made from 25 million measurements, over two orders of magnitude more than were used in Bedmap1. In most parts of Antarctica the subglacial landscape is visible in much greater detail than was previously available and the improved datacoverage has in many areas revealed the full scale of mountain ranges, valleys, basins and troughs, only fragments of which were previously indicated in local surveys. The derived statistics for Bedmap2 show that the volume of ice contained in the Antarctic ice sheet (27 million km3) and its potential contribution to sea-level rise (58 m) are similar to those of Bedmap1, but the mean thickness of the ice sheet is 4.6% greater, the mean depth of the bed beneath the grounded ice sheet is 72m lower and the area of ice sheet grounded on bed below sea level is increased by 10 %. The Bedmap2 compilation highlights several areas beneath the ice sheet where the bed elevation is substantially lower than the deepest bed indicated by Bedmap1. These products, along with grids of data coverage and uncertainty, provide new opportunities for detailed modelling of the past and future evolution of the Antarctic ice sheets.

We analyze the seismicity of a small sector of the Northern Apennines merging data from the Italian seismic bulletin with original data collected by temporary seismic networks. Our attention is focused on the region enclosed between the Apenninic watershed and the Adriatic Sea. This portion of belt is interested by the occurrence of diffuse crustal seismicity and small-to-moderate earthquakes. In this paper we study the five small sequences with mainshock having Mw < 4.7 that in the past 15 years hit the area. Our interest is addressed to better understand the relationship between these events and the regional seismotectonic setting in terms of seismicity distribution and stress field. Two regions with different behavior in the seismic release can be distinguished: (i) along the watershed where seismicity is clustered at shallow depths (< 15 km) and where strong earthquakes occurred in the past, (ii) an eastern portion where the seismicity is distributed across all of the crustal volume, locally reaching depths down to 30 km. The focal mechanism of the seismic sequences shows mainly normal fault kinematics coherent with the regional stress field. Detailed stress field analysis suggests a rotation of the principal stress axis moving from the axial part of the chain toward the Adriatic Sea to the east.

Chemical and isotopic data have been used as geochemical tracers for a genetic characterization of hydrocarbon gases from a total of eleven manifestations located in Eastern and Central-Southern Sicily (Italy). The molecular analysis shows that almost all the samples are enriched in methane (up to 93.2% Vol.), with the exception of four gas samples collected around Mt. Etna showing high mantle-derived CO2 content. Methane isotope signatures suggest that these are thermogenic gases or a mixture between thermogenic gases and microbial gases. Although samples from some mud volcanoes in Southern Sicily (Macalube di Aragona) show isotope signatures consistent with a mixing model between thermogenic and microbial, by combining the molecular compositions (C1/(C2 + C3))and the methane isotope ratios (d13C1), such a process seems to be excluded. Therefore, the occurrence of secondary post-genetic processes should be invoked. Two main hypotheses have been considered: the first hypothesis includes that the gas is produced by microbial activity and altered post-genetically by microbial oxidation of methane, while according to the second hypothesis thermogenic gas have modified their molecular ratios due to vertical migration.