Page 17 - i1052-5173-27-3-4

250 Million Years of Earth History in Central Italy: Celebrating
25 Years of the Geological Observatory of Coldigioco
25–29 September 2017 • Apiro, Marche Region, Italy
Conveners
Alessandro Montanari, Osservatorio Geologico di Coldigioco,
I-62020 Frontale di Apiro (MC), Italy; sandro.coldigioco@gmail.
com
Christian Koeberl, Dept. of Lithospheric Research, University
of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, A-1090 Vienna, Austria, and Natural
History Museum, Burgring 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria; christian.
koeberl@univie.ac.at
Sponsors
GSA Foundation, Barringer Crater Company, and Associazione
Le Montagne di San Francesco
Description and Objectives
Central Italy has been a cradle of geology for centuries. Since
the beginning of the last century, the Triassic to Miocene carbon-
ate succession exposed along the valleys of the Umbria and
Marche Apennines of Italy has been a fertile playground for gen-
erations of earth scientists, particularly paleontologists, sedimen-
tologists, stratigraphers, geophysicists, and structural geologists,
from all over the world. It is in this geological theater that pioneer-
ing studies in the most disparate disciplines of the earth sciences
have led to the understanding of novel principles and natural phe-
nomena of the past, the development of new methodologies and
experimental research approaches, and ultimately to
View of the town of Apiro in front of Monte San Vicino (image credit:
C. Koeberl).
www.geosociety.org/gsatoday
discontinuities in scientific thinking, with the birth of such con-
cepts as Event Stratigraphy, Integrated Stratigraphy, and
Cyclostratigraphy applied to astronomical tuning, let alone
Quaternary Geology, Neotectonics, and Speleogeology. The
Umbria-Marche Apennines of northeastern Italy are a foreland
fold-and-thrust belt, which was formed in the latest phase of the
Alpine-Himalayan orogenesis. These mountains are entirely made
of marine sedimentary rocks of the so-called Umbria-Marche
Succession, which represents a continuous record of the geo­
tectonic evolution of an epeiric sea from the Early Triassic to the
Pleistocene. Studies of these rocks have promoted sensational dis-
coveries, particularly about major events that have punctuated the
history of Earth, such has the Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Events
(OAE1 and OAE2), the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) Boundary
Event (with the global mass extinction caused by a catastrophic
extraterrestrial impact), the events across the Eocene-Oligocene
transition from a greenhouse to an icehouse world, and the
Messinian Salinity Crisis of the Mediterranean, just to name the
most famous ones.
The objective of this conference is to present an updated vision
of 250 million years of earth history as recorded in the sedimen-
tary succession of the northern Apennine orogeny in central Italy.
At the conference, besides keynote review presentations, original
research works will be presented covering specific subjects of
Tectonics and Structural Geology, Integrated Stratigraphy and
Astronomical Tuning, Extraterrestrial Event Stratigraphy, and
Quaternary Geology and Geo-Bio Speleology. These research
works are either still in progress or they were accomplished but
never published before, all with the support of the Geological
Observatory of Coldigioco, an independent research and educa-
tional center, which was founded in an abandoned medieval ham-
let near Apiro in 1992 by Alessandro Montanari, Walter Alvarez,
and David Bice.
Studies are now in progress about the recent tectono-seismic
and structural history of the still active Umbria-Marche
Apennines (as is exemplified by the recent seismic activity in
2016). More studies by international teams of stratigraphers are
being conducted through long and continuous stretches of the
Umbria-Marche sedimentary succession, focusing on the integra-
tion of bio-magneto-chemostratigraphy and radioisotopic geo-
chronology with astronomical tuning via multiproxy cyclostrati-
graphic analysis.
One of the primary results that have been derived from the
Umbria-Marche sedimentary succession in the past 25 years with
the support of the Geological Observatory of Coldigioco has been
the development of the subject of the role that extraterrestrial
17