Hydrogeology of the Nurra Region, Sardinia (Italy): basement-cover influences on groundwater occurrence and hydrogeochemistry

The Nurra district in the Island of Sardinia (Italy) has a Palaeozoic basement and covers, consisting of Mesozoic carbonates, Cenozoic pyroclastic rocks and Quaternary, mainly clastic, sediments. The faulting and folding affecting the covers predominantly control the geomorphology. The morphology of the southern part is controlled by the Tertiary volcanic activity that generated a stack of pyroclastic flows. Geological structures and lithology exert the main control on recharge and groundwater circulation, as well as its availability and quality. The watershed divides do not fit the groundwater divide; the latter is conditioned by open folds and by faults. The Mesozoic folded carbonate sequences contain appreciable amounts of groundwater, particularly where structural lows are generated by synclines and normal faults. The regional groundwater flow has been defined. The investigated groundwater shows relatively high TDS and chloride concentrations which, along with other hydrogeochemical evidence, rules out sea-water intrusion as the cause of high salinity. The high chloride and sulphate concentrations can be related to deep hydrothermal circuits and to Triassic evaporites, respectively. The source water chemistry has been modified by various geochemical processes due to the groundwater–rock interaction, including ion exchange with hydrothermal minerals and clays, incongruent solution of dolomite, and sulphate reduction.     

A new percoid fish from the Eocene of Monte Bolca, Italy: Hendrixella grandei gen. & sp. nov.

A new genus and species of percoid fish, Hendrixella grandei gen. & sp. nov. is described from the upper Ypresian limestone of Monte Bolca, Italy. It is based on four well-preserved specimens that show an elongate and slender body and a unique combination of features, including possession of 11 + 13 vertebrae, two series of intermuscular bones, fused haemal spine of third preural centrum, caudal fin with 17 principal rays and 11 upper and eight lower procurrent rays, predorsal formula 0/0/1 + 1/1/, two separated dorsal fins with rayless pterygiophore in-between, and a single supernumerary spine in both dorsal and anal fins. Due to this unique combination of features, Hendrixella cannot be placed within any existing fossil or extant percoid families and it is placed incertae sedis in the Percoidei. The possession of two series of intermuscular bones represents an unambiguous autapomorphy of Hendrixella. A comparative analysis of the distribution of intermusculars among percomorph fishes indicates that the intermuscular bones of the upper series can be homologized with the epineurals and those of the lower series are the homologs of the epicentrals of non-acanthomorphs.     

Late Holocene vertical deformation along the coast of Pantelleria Island (Sicily Channel, Italy)

According to historical reports, the north-eastern coastal sector of the volcanic Pantelleria Island (Sicily Channel, Italy) was uplifted up to 1.0 m a.s.l. in the year preceding the October 1891 offshore eruptive event. To better understand the nature and timing of coastal uplift, a detailed survey of morphological and biological indicators of raised palaeo-shorelines has been carried out along the island coastline. This survey identified raised palaeo-shoreline levels at three elevation ranges: 2.5–4.2 m a.s.l. (highest), 1.5–2.7 m a.s.l. (intermediate) and 0.4–1.0 m a.s.l. (lowest). Radiocarbon dating on samples of corals and vermetids placed tight temporal constraints on the uplifting of the raised shorelines. In general, they indicate that the north-eastern sector of the island, centred on the area of Cala del Gadir, has undergone major uplifting, tilting the island towards the southwest from 900 years ago. Applying accurate corrections for sea-level variations, the total amount of volcano-tectonic uplift can be estimated. Uplift rates up to 5 mm/a suggest that the vertical deformation was caused by inflation processes related to magmatic intrusion along feeding fissures.     

Late Miocene fish otoliths from the Colombacci Formation (Northern Apennines,Italy): implications for the Messinian ‘Lago‐mare’ event

A fish otolith assemblage from the Messinian ‘Lago‐mare’ deposits of the Colombacci Formation cropping out in the Montecalvo in Foglia Syncline, Marche, central Italy, is described. The assemblage displays a low diversity and consists of seven taxa belonging to three families: the Gobiidae, Myctophidae and Sciaenidae. Sciaenid otoliths are the most abundant elements representing 88% of the entire assemblage. The palaeoecological analysis reveals a coastal shallow marine environment strongly influenced by continental outflow. The low diversity and high abundance of the euryecious sciaenids are indicative of a very simplified food web, which probably represented an ecological response to the fluctuating environmental parameters and available food resources. The fish remains documented here provide an unambiguous evidence that normal marine conditions were present in the Mediterranean, at least in the upper part of the ‘Lago‐mare’ event, and unquestionably demonstrate that the marine refilling preceded the Mio‐Pliocene boundary. These findings clearly demonstrate that fishes, because of their mobility and migratory behaviour, represent a useful tool for the large‐scale interpretation of the environmental conditions of the Messinian Mediterranean water body. The necessity of a new scenario of palaeoenvironmental evolution for the post‐evaporitic Messinian of the Mediterranean is also discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Composition and processes of the mantle lithosphere in northeastern Brazil and Fernando de Noronha: evidence from mantle xenoliths

Spinel–peridotite facies mantle xenoliths in Cenozoic alkali basalts of the Pico Cabuji volcano (Rio Grande do Norte State, Northeast Brazil) and the adjacent South Atlantic oceanic island of Fernando de Noronha are studied for: (1) the information they provide on the composition of the lithospheric component in the erupted basalt geochemistry, and (2) to check the effects of the Fernando de Noronha plume track on the mantle lithosphere. Xenoliths from Pico Cabuji are protogranular lherzolites and porphyroclastic harzburgites recording average equilibrium temperatures of 825 ± 116 and 1248 ± 19 °C, respectively. Pressure in the porphyroclastic xenoliths ranges from 1.9 to 2.7 GPa (Ca-in-olivine geobarometer). Both groups show major element chemical variation trends in whole-rock and Ti and HREE (Er, Yb) variations in clinopyroxene consistent with fractional melting and basalt extraction. REE (rare earth element) profiles of clinopyroxenes vary from LREE (La, Ce) enriched (spoon shaped) to LREE depleted in the protogranular group, whereas they are slightly convex upward in most porphyroclastic clinopyroxenes. HFSE (Ti and Zr) negative anomalies are in general modest in the clinopyroxenes of both groups. Xenoliths from Fernando de Noronha have textural variations similar to those of Pico Cabuji. Protogranular and porphyroclastic samples have similar temperature (1035 ± 80 °C) and the pressure is 1–1.9 and 2.3 GPa, respectively. Whole-rock chemical variation trends overlap and extend further than those of Pico Cabuji. The trace element profiles of the clinopyroxenes of the porphyroclastic xenoliths are enriched in La up to 30 × PM and are smoothly fractionated from LREE to HREE, with deep, negative, Zr and Ti anomalies. The geochemical heterogeneities of the xenoliths from both localities are interpreted in terms of reactive porous percolation. The porphyroclastic xenoliths from Pico Cabuji represent the lower part of a mantle column (the head of a mantle diapir, at the transition conductive–adiabatic mantle), where OIB infiltration triggers melting, and the protogranular xenoliths the top of the mantle column, chromatographically enriched by percolation at a low melt/rock ratio. This interpretation may also apply for Fernando de Noronha, but the different geochemical signature recorded by the clinopyroxenes requires a different composition of the infiltrated melt. Nd and Sr isotopes of the Pico Cabuji porphyroclastic clinopyroxenes (¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd= 0.51339–0.51255, ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr=0.70275–0.70319) and of Fernando de Noronha (¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd=0.51323–0.51285, ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr=0.70323–0.70465) plot on distinct arrays originating from a similar, isotopically depleted composition and trending to low Nd–low Sr (EMI) and low Nd–high Sr (EMII), respectively. Correlation of the isotope variation with geochemical parameters indicates that the isotopic variation was induced by the metasomatic component, of EMI type at Pico Cabuji and of EMII type at Fernando de Noronha. These different components enriched a lithosphere isotopically similar to DMM (depleted MORB mantle) at both localities. At Fernando de Noronha, the isotopic signature of the metasomatic component is similar to that of the ∼ 8 Ma old lavas of the Remedios Formation, suggesting that this is the age of metasomatism. At Pico Cabuji, the mantle xenoliths do not record the high ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr component present in the basalts. We speculate that the EMII component derives from a lithospheric reservoir, which was not thermally affected during mantle metasomatism at Pico Cabuji, but was mobilized by the hotspot thermal influence at Fernando de Noronha. This interpretation provides a plausible explanation for the presence of distinct metasomatic components at the two localities, which would be difficult to reconcile with their genetic relationship with the same plume. Received: 12 June 1999 / Accepted: 13 December 1999     

Westward drift of the lithosphere: not a result of rotational drag

It is shown that any non-zero torque resulting from differences in angular velocity between individual shells in the Earth would be an extremely short transient phenomenon as a consequence of the viscosity of the asthenosphere. Consequently, it cannot be a factor in the origin of the toroidal velocity field of degree one ('westward drift') of the lithosphere.     

Closed‐form aftershock reliability of damage‐cumulating elastic‐perfectly‐plastic systems

Major earthquakes (i.e., mainshocks) typically trigger a sequence of lower magnitude events clustered both in time and space. Recent advances of seismic hazard analysis stochastically model aftershock occurrence (given the main event) as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process with rate that decays in time as a negative power law. Risk management in the post‐event emergency phase has to deal with this short‐term seismicity. In fact, because the structural systems of interest might have suffered some damage in the mainshock, possibly worsened by damaging aftershocks, the failure risk may be large until the intensity of the sequence reduces or the structure is repaired. At the state‐of‐the‐art, the quantitative assessment of aftershock risk is aimed at building tagging, that is, to regulate occupancy. The study, on the basis of age‐dependent stochastic processes, derived closed‐form approximations for the aftershock reliability of simple nonevolutionary elastic‐perfectly‐plastic damage‐cumulating systems, conditional on different information about the structure. Results show that, in the case hypotheses apply, the developed models may represent a basis for handy tools enabling risk‐informed tagging by stakeholders and decision makers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identification of lateral discontinuities via multi‐offset phase analysis of surface wave data

Surface wave methods are based on the inversion of observed Rayleigh wave phase‐velocity dispersion curves. The goal is to estimate mainly the shear‐wave velocity profile of the investigated site. The model used for the interpretation is 1D, hence results obtained wherever lateral variations are present cannot be considered reliable. In this paper, we study four synthetic models, all with a lateral heterogeneity. When we process the entire corresponding seismograms with traditional f‐k approach, the resulting 1D profiles are representative of the subsurface properties averaged over the whole length of the receivers lines. These results show that classical analysis disregards evidences of sharp lateral velocity changes even when they show up in the raw seismograms. In our research, we implement and test over the same synthetic models, a novel robust automated method to check the appropriateness of 1D model assumption and locate the discontinuities. This new approach is a development of the recent multi‐offset phase analysis with the following further advantages: it does not need previous noise evaluation and more than one shot. Only once the discontinuities are clearly identified, we confidently perform classical f‐k dispersion curve extraction and inversion separately on both sides of the discontinuity. Thus the final results, obtained by putting side by side the 1D profiles, are correct 2D reconstructions of the discontinuous S‐wave distributions obtained without any additional ad‐hoc hypotheses.     

Frequency‐dependent multi‐offset phase analysis of surface waves: an example of high‐resolution characterization of a riparian aquifer

Multi‐offset phase analysis of seismic surface waves is an established technique for the extraction of dispersion curves with high spatial resolution and, consequently, for the investigation of the subsurface in terms of shear wave velocity distribution. However, field applications are rarely documented in the published literature. In this paper, we discuss an implementation of the multi‐offset phase analysis consisting of the estimation of the Rayleigh wave velocity by means of a moving window with a frequency‐dependent length. This allows maximizing the lateral resolution at high frequencies while warranting stability at the lower frequencies. In this way, we can retrieve the shallow lateral variability with high accuracy and, at the same time, obtain a robust surface‐wave velocity measurement at depth. In this paper, we apply this methodology to a dataset collected for hydrogeophysical purposes and compare the inversion results with those obtained by using refraction seismics and electrical resistivity tomography. The surface‐wave results are in good agreement with those provided by the other methods and demonstrate a superior capability in retrieving both lateral and vertical velocity variations, including inversions. Our results are further corroborated by the lithological information from a borehole drilled on the acquisition line. The availability of multi‐offset phase analysis data also allows disentangling a fairly complex interpretation of the other geophysical results.     

Contents of Volume 1 (2003)

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 1 (2003)