Thirty Years of Activity of INGV Devoted to the Preservation of the Tangible and Intangible Heritage of Instrumental Seismology: A Bridge Between Science and Culture

Date: 4/26/2019

Time: 06:00 PM

Room: Grand Ballroom

Italy can boast a long as well as prestigious tradition in instrumental earthquake observation, and an important amount of data and instruments are still in historical observatories. In the past 30 years INGV has promoted two important projects for the research, recovery, reproduction, conservation and valorisation of this outstanding historical and scientific heritage: the TROMOS Project (1988 – ) and the SISMOS Project (2000 - ).

Since 2008 SISMOS combine the “philosophies” of the two projects into a single multidisciplinary, multicultural and multi-user approach. Hence the attention is drawn to the historical assets of Italian seismology both as scientific data and as cultural heritage.

SISMOS operates on a potential of few millions of seismograms recorded in Italy (1895 - 1984): about 400,000 of recordings have been catalogued and about 240,000 of these have been scanned.

On 2002 the ESC and SISMOS lauched the EuroSeismos project (2002 - ), making possible to scan about 30,000 seismograms of the most important 20th Century Euro-Mediterranean earthquakes collected from 37 countries.

The scientific use of seismograms requires also some complementary documentation (seismic bulletins, articles in scientific journals, station notebooks, etc.) to extract the instrumental constants that SISMOS search and scan.

For the vectorisation of the seismograms, the Teseo2 software has been developed. This allows for the manual and semi-automatic follow up of the seismogram, resampling and alignment, curvature correction and time realignment, along with the saving of the results in different formats.

A restoration laboratory for seismograms and another for historical instruments are also operating.

A dedicated website (sismos.rm.ingv.it/en/) freely distributes the high resolution images of seismograms, about 500,000 pages of complementary documentation and Teseo2.

SISMOS has increased the number of researchers involved in the use of historical seismograms, making possible the instrumental study of some of the most important historical Euro-Mediterranean earthquakes.

Presenting Author: Graziano Ferrari

Authors