Month: March 2024

A core goal of this trip was to collect sands from sedimentary deposits that formed in shallow marine and beach environments, and subsequently have been uplifted to varying elevations above sea level. The trip has been a huge success in this regard! Below is a photo showing the highest marine terrace at about 1,000 meters elevation.

Sergio is a master drone pilot, and his photos are super helpful for studying these surfaces.

Below is a screenshot from a video he took of me collecting sand from one of these high marine terrace deposits.

Photos below show what we found on the side of this high cliff: uncemented marine beach sand!

Sergio is a great chef and he cooked us a delicious Sicilian dish of rigatoni pasta with red tomato basil eggplant sauce which we devoured.  Marco Meschis arrived in time to make the bruschetta and join us for this feast.

The next day Sergio, Marco and I got back to work scouting more terraces at lower elevations.

Below is a nice shot of stratified gravel and sand that formed in an uncertain environment.  I think it looks like a beach gravel but we did not see any shells so it could be a river gravel (but I doubt it).

The next day Marco and I found a beautiful shelly marine sand at 160 m elevation that previous workers have determined is about 125,000 years old.  This indicates a time-averaged uplift rate of 1.3 m per thousand years (= mm/yr), which is typical for this tectonically active setting.

We celebrated with dinner at a local restaurant. Now we will await the results of age dating to determine the next steps in our new collaborative study.

Time has flown by and I got behind on the blog again, for good reason.  My sister Sarah arrived in Reggio Calabria and we promptly headed out to sample the best gelato in town … and were not disappointed!  My favorite flavor is stracciatella.

The big excitement last week was our trip to Sicily!  We rented a car and Charlie drove while I navigated, with Sarah and Brent held captive in the back seat.  First stop was the scenic town of Cefalù (below), which is where the beach scenes in White Lotus Season 2 were shot (we were a little obsessed with this topic during the trip).

Next stop was the great city of Palermo which has a rich history of cultural influence from Greece and Africa.  Our hotel was a block away from the famous Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele, shown below.  You may know that the opera scene in the second season of the White Lotus was shot here.

We enjoyed fine dining in the historic Centro Storico and had some time to relax in the sun.

Then we drove across the island to Catania, another fascinating city with a deep history.  Below you can see the remains of an ancient Roman theatre.

The next morning we woke up to see Mount Etna looming over the street where our hotel was located, which is aptly called Via Etnea. This giant volcano is fed by mantle-derived mafic magmas moving up along a network of active faults produced by tears in the subducting Ionian slab.  Etna was a constant presence for the next 2 days.

Below Charlie demonstrates the fine art of “being scale” for a geology photo. Here he shows us the size of a lava tube in young basalt on the flank of Etna. He has been doing this since we met.

We circumnavigated the base of this giant volcano, had lunch in Bronte (Sergio’s home!), and finished the day by pulling into the highly touristic fairy tale town of Taormina.  This is where most scenes of – you guessed it – White Lotus Season 2 were shot.

Below is the Greek Theatre of Taormina, second largest theater in Sicily and site of a scene in White Lotus 2. The theatre affords a stunning view of the Catania coast and Mount Etna.

The local art work is extremely bright and colorful. We were intrigued by the diversity of color ceramic heads which figure prominently in – yes – Season 2 of the White Lotus.

Below is a shot looking north along the coast from a little cafe at the top of the Taormina Greek Theatre. This angle highlights classic tectonic topography and uplifted Quaternary marine terraces in the footwall of the active Messina-Taormina fault which is located a short distance offshore.

At the end of the trip we delivered the rental car to Messina without a scratch (thanks to Charlie for excellent driving!), took the ferry back to Calabria, and enjoyed a final sunset view of Etna.

The next day our friend Sergio arrived and a new phase of field work began … to be described in the next post.

Life in Reggio Calabria is good!  A lot has happened since my last post, which has made it hard to keep up with the blog (a good problem to have).  Below are a few photos of recent adventures and field work.  Most days start at the local cafe with a cornetto albicocca, a cappuccino for me, and a tea for Charlie. We’re delighted to have our friend Brent visiting from Oregon (I don’t have photos of him yet).

We recently went to the small town of Scilla which is famous in Greek mythology as the home of man-eating monsters.  The Ruffo Castle of Scilla, shown below, has a history that goes back to the 5th century BC (see Wikipedia article).

From the highest room in the castle we got an impressive view of a young fault that cuts an uplifted 125,000 year old marine terrace (the upper surface with buildings).  Motion on the fault has produced a distinctive “wine glass canyon” morphology produced by erosion in the footwall of the fault.

Below is a view of Messina Strait on our long hike up a steep ridge east of Archi.  Not boring.

Hiking up this ridge we found a young uplifted marine deposit with beautiful fossil shells!

The marine fossiliferous sandstone rests on top of impressive Gilbert delta deposits recognized by their distinctive foreset and topset geometries. We saw some beautiful examples of sedimentology in the foreset deposits (not shown here).

Yesterday we took an exciting taxi ride up to a high terrace at about 1,000 m elevation and found a marine limestone deposit with more fossil shells. Below is a shot of Charlie showing fine form as he collects a sample.  Below that is a look at the high terrace surface.  We want to figure out the age of this terrace, to help understand the rate of fault slip and uplift in the region.

Below is my best shot yet of the Messina Strait.  It’s a magical place and the geology is amazing.

My sister Sarah arrives today and the adventure continues!

Charlie and I were super excited to take the train south from Potenza on Tuesday and enter “The Zone”!  This place has a magical draw for both of us: for the ancient history (Greeks and Romans), the more ancient history (geology, active tectonics, sedimentology, rapid uplift and mountain building), culture, food, people, and the Messina Strait itself.  Two days ago we worked here in Calabria, not far from our apartment in Reggio Calabria.  Then yesterday we went to Sicily.  The photo below was taken from near the NE end of the Peloritani Mountains in Sicily, looking ~ENE through the narrow constriction of the active conjugate relay zone where extensional strain is transferred from NW-dipping normal faults in Calabria to SE-dipping normal faults in Sicily.  Sorry for TMI!

To get there we took a ferry across the narrow part of the strait from Villa San Giovani to the historic city of Messina, which was destroyed by a M7.1 earthquake in 1908. The fault structure responsible for this earthquake, the source of tsunamis that inundated coastal cities during the event, and the geometry of faults that drive active seismicity in the region are all the subject of active research and debate.  Here is the waterfront of Messina as seen from our ferry on our approach to the port, with the low young mountain range behind it.

We undertook this first round of fieldwork with our friend and colleague Domenico Chiarella, who is originally from Calabria and is now a professor at Royal Holloway University in London. Domenico is a great geologist and stratigrapher who has studied the sedimentology and evolution of the Messina Strait region for many years, and he knows the area very well. Below is a shot of Charlie and Domenico as we headed out yesterday:

This was out first trip to Sicily and we were not disappointed! The goal of our mission on this day was to find, describe, and collect a tuff interbedded in a claystone deposit called Argille di Spadafora which, based on microfossils and biostratigraphy, formed in a deep marine basin sometime between 500,000 and 1 million years ago. Since then this marine clay unit has been uplifted to elevations up to 500 meters above sea level in northeastern Sicily. The photo below shows our approach to the collecting site.  We did have permission from the land owner to access this site, and the cows also seemed to approve.

We found the tuff!  Below you can see Domenico moving in for a close look, and yes it’s a tuff!

Below is the obligatory close-up view.  This is an inversely graded tuff with horizontally stratified well sorted ash in the lower part that coarsens up into lapilli tuff with granule-size pumice fragments and out-sized pumice pieces up to 4 cm long.  We collected this tuff, and hope to find sanidine grains that can be dated with argon isotopes at a lab in Pisa.  There is a lot more to say about this, maybe in a future post.

The ferry back to Calabria at the end of the day was breath-taking. In the view below there are at least 4 prominent terrace levels that represent uplifted remnants of an ancient marine shelf.  Can you spot them?

Today we went back to work on the Calabrian side.  Our first stop was a photo op looking southwest toward the looming majestic active volcano at Mount Etna. More breath-taking moments.

Below is a shot of the boys, feeling good after collecting our second sample!  This one was a detrital sandstone sample, which means it is a mix of grains with a range of different compositions.  If we are lucky enough to find sanidine grains, they are likely to have a wide range of ages which makes dating the age of deposition more difficult but not impossible.

We finished up with some more field work, then Domenico dropped us off at our apartment and drove to the airport to take a plane back to London. We found a little pizzeria and had a slice of pizza and aranciata (fizzy orange juice), then took a stroll along the gorgeous waterfront of Reggio Calabria. Domenico told us that a famous 20th century Italian poet  declared this to be “the most beautiful kilometer in Italy” (even though, or maybe because, he was from northern Italy). I would have to agree.

Charlie and I now have a few days “off” to explore the city and maybe take a day trip to – who knows where – there are lots of options.  Then back to field work next week.  The adventure continues!