The Geological features of Italy by Jeanette Favaloro Spring 2025

 Hello and Welcome to my blog!

This blog is about...Italia!



Image taken from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Italia_Bandiera.png

This blog is for a class I am taking: Geology 9 at Monterey Peninsula College with Dr. Ana Garcia-Garcia.  This week I would like to introduce Italy, tell you why I chose it, and discuss hazards, disasters, and catastrophes.  As the semester progresses, we will delve into the geology of Italy.

Italy is a small country in Southern Europe that shares its northern borders with France, Switzerland,  Austria, and Slovenia.  The remainder of Italy is either a peninsula or an island.  Its eastern border is on the Adriatic Sea, its southern border is on the Ionian Sea, and its western border is on the Tyrrhenian Sea which is a portion of the Mediterranean Sea.  The climate in Italy is quite like our climate in the Monterey Bay area.  The country has an area of 301,340 km^2 and a population size of about 59.2 million.  Its capital is Rome and its government is Unitary parliamentary republic with Sergio Mattarella as President.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/italy-population/

I chose Italia because I have Italian roots on my dad's side.  My grandfather and great-grandparents on my dad's side were all born in Italy proper or Sicily, and then emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s.  I hope to go visit and possibly go work and live in Italy in a few years, so I am trying to learn as much as I can about the country.  My geology class will provide me with an excuse to learn about the geological features, and this blog will allow me to record and report on what I have learned!

The last thing that I wanted to discuss today is hazards, disasters, and catastrophes.  Let us start with geological hazards.  These are natural occurrences that have the potential to cause damage to life, human property, and/or the environment.  Examples of hazards are earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and associated hazards like ash and toxic gases, landslides, tsunamis, floods, and even land that collapses due to permafrost thawing.  The largest natural hazards in Italy are earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and landslides, changes in temperature and weather patterns as a result of climate change, and glacier retreat.
 
Sources: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/aknatureandscience/geohazards.htm#:~:text=They%20can%20be%20hazardous%20to,collapses%20due%20to%20thawing%20permafrost.
https://spark.liceodesio.edu.it/mod/book/view.php?id=1874&chapterid=96

As we learned in the text and Dr. Garcia-Garcia's Chapter 1 video, a disaster is when a hazard affects human society.  A disaster is short-term and usually in a small (relatively-speaking) area.  There is usually some type of loss associated with a disaster, whether it be loss of life or property damage.  For instance, in Spring 2023, Monterey County had floods in Salinas near Spreckels that forced people to evacuate and led to a substantial amount of crop loss.  Recent Italian disasters were earthquakes in 2016 the Lazio and Umbria regions, Etna and Stromboli eruptions in Sicily, and flash floods in Marche in 2022.

Sources:
https://oercommons.org/courses/natural-disasters-new-version-coming-soon/view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mjIRub-Xbw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK0gnnWvkJY
https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/italian/italian-social-issues/natural-disaster-italy/

A catastrophe is like a natural disaster, but much, much worse.  A catastrophe is a massive disaster that affects many people and usually for a long period of time for recovery.  Dr. Garcia-Garcia referred to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in her video for Chapter 1.  It Italy, some famous catastrophic events were the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in the year AD79 and the Messina Earthquake of 1908, which also triggered a tsunami.

Sources:
https://oercommons.org/courses/natural-disasters-new-version-coming-soon/view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mjIRub-Xbw
https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/italian/italian-social-issues/natural-disaster-italy/

Thanks for reading my blog this week.  See you soon!






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