Presence of plastic debris in loggerhead turtle stranded along the Tuscany coasts of the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals (Italy)

This work evaluated the presence and the frequency of occurrence of marine litter in the gastrointestinal tract of 31 Caretta caretta found stranded or accidentally bycaught in the North Tyrrhenian Sea. Marine debris were present in 71% of specimens and were subdivided in different categories according to Fulmar Protocol (OSPAR 2008). The main type of marine debris found was user plastic, with the main occurrence of sheetlike user plastic. The small juveniles showed a mean ± SD of marine debris items of 19.00 ± 23.84, while the adult specimens showed higher values of marine litter if compared with the juveniles (26.87 ± 35.85). The occurrence of marine debris observed in this work confirms the high impact of marine debris in the Mediterranean Sea in respect to other seas and oceans, and highlights the importance of Caretta caretta as good indicator for marine litter in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) of European Union.     

Coastal hazard assessment and mapping in Northern Campania, Italy

In the Northern Campanian coastal zone, over 150 km long, three geomorphic units are recognised: (1) sandy beaches that are well developed in the northern area, where a prominent river mouth (Volturno River) is also present; (2) steep and rocky shores, often with gravelly beaches or debris cones at their base, are mainly diffuse in the southern area (Sorrentine Peninsula); and, lastly, (3) “techno coast”, shorelines stabilized with revetments and seawalls as well as former natural environments no longer clearly operational because of urbanization, as is visible in Naples and in the Vesuvian coast. Six primary hazards are considered in this investigation: shoreline erosion, riverine flooding, storms, landslides, seismicity and volcanism, and man-made structures. These hazards do not have a uniform distribution along this coast in terms of their frequency and intensity; moreover both their interaction and the intensive action of humans, often uncontrolled, makes it difficult to assess the overall coastal hazard. In this paper a semi-quantitative method with which to quantify, rank and map the distribution of hazard is applied along this particular stretch of coast. In such a stretch, previously characterized in terms of types and processes and compartmentalized into geomorphic units, the effect of individual hazards, based on their magnitude and recurrence, is evaluated. Dominant and subordinate hazards for each geomorphic unit are identified, assigning a rank that is also a weighting. Comparison of each weighting through an interaction matrix permits the calculation of a resultant, which is the overall hazard assessment and which can be expressed cartographically. The results obtained for a coastal zone with one of the highest pressures from urbanization in the world, help us to recognise that this approach could become a useful tool to aid decision-making regarding coastal land-use and planning.     

High precision triple oxygen isotope composition of small size urban micrometeorites indicating constant influx composition in the early geologic past

In this study, we present a method for high precision Δ′¹⁷O (Δ′¹⁷O_RL = ln(δ¹⁷O + 1) – λ_RL ln(δ¹⁸O + 1)) analysis of small mass silicate and oxide materials. The analyses were conducted by laser fluorination in combination with gas chromatography and continuous flow isotope ratio monitoring gas spectrometry. We could analyze the oxygen isotope composition of samples down to 1 μg, which corresponded to about 13 nmol O₂. The analytical error (we report the 1σ external reproducibility of a single analysis) in δ¹⁸O increases with decreasing sample sizes from ~0.2‰ for ~20 μg samples to ~0.9‰ for 1 μg samples. For Δ′¹⁷O, we achieved an external reproducibility of 0.04‰ for a sample mass range between 1 and 27 μg. The uncertainty in Δ′¹⁷O is smaller than the uncertainty in δ¹⁸O due to the correlated errors in δ¹⁷O and δ¹⁸O. We applied the method to urban micrometeorites, that is, small meteorites (<2 mm) that were sampled from a rooftop in Berlin, Germany. A total of 10 melted micrometeorites (S-type cosmic spherules, masses between 11 and 22 μg) were analyzed. The oxygen isotope compositions are comparable to that of modern Antarctic collections, indicating that the urban micrometeorites sample the same population. No indication for terrestrial weathering had been identified in the studied set of urban micrometeorites making them suitable materials for the study of micrometeorite origins.