Claudia Principe

Claudia Principe. Episodes -0001;0:. https://doi.org/10.18814/epiiugs/2026/026026

This paper is a personal and professional reflection by the author on the life, scientific legacy, and influence on her own scientific career by Katia Krafft, a pioneering 20th-century female French volcanologist. Katia, along with her husband Maurice, died tragically on June 3, 1991, during a pyroclastic flow at Mount Unzen in Japan. Over 21 years of marriage, Katia and Maurice dedicated their lives to documenting volcanic activity. They visited over 300 volcanoes, witnessed around 175 eruptions, and produced over 20 illustrated books, thousands of photos, and numerous educational films. Operating in a deeply male-dominated field, Katia was the organized mind of the duo, managing funds, coordinating emergency travels, and bringing a profound artistic sensitivity to her photography. As a consequence of the Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia, tragedy in 1985, Katia focused her activities on furthering the spread of information regarding the hazards of volcanos through visual media to the non-scientific community. Katia Kraffts' greatest legacy is in transforming a personal passion for the beauty of volcanoes into a lifesaving, humanitarian mission on public safety.

Archaeomagnetic studies provide crucial information on the spatial and temporal evolution of the geomagnetic field as recorded in rocks and archeological artifacts, offering insights into both Earth’s magnetic evolution and past geological and human activities. Measurements of the direction, intensity, and relative variations in the Earth’s Magnetic Field (EMF) are performed using sensitive magnetometers. Among these, induction magnetometers exploit Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction to measure magnetic fields with high precision. In this work, we present a comparison between two different configurations of Helmholtz-based induction magnetometers carried out through the analysis of the magnetic field distribution obtained through analytical simulations. The study examines both the uniformity and intensity of the magnetic fields produced by each configuration, highlighting the influence of coil geometry on field homogeneity and sensitivity. The results reveal differences between the two configurations, providing important insights for optimizing magnetometer design, improving measurement accuracy, and facilitating analytical procedures in archaeomagnetic research.

Gonfienti old city (near Prato, Tuscany, Central Italy) was positioned on an alluvial fan at the southern termination of the road connecting the Arno valley with the Etruria centers of the Po Valley, North of the Apennines. During Etruscan period, Gonfienti was an important commercial settlement on the road system connecting the Tyrrhenian area on one side and the Po Valley on the other. The archeological studies conducted following 1997 in the Gonfienti area highlighted the presence of a large settlement of more than 27 hectares, which has been affected and adapted over the centuries to the hydrographic regime defined by Calvana and Bisenzio rivers. Archaeomagnetic directional analyses of two furnaces and one oven found in the Etruscan settlements of Carraia, along the cutting the Calvana relief road, and Gonfienti Etruscan settlement, resulted in an age spanning during the fourth century BC for the oven positioned inside the “Interporto” area of Gonfienti. This age agrees with the last Etruscan phase of occupation of the city of Gonfienti, started in the fourth century BC after a period of abandonment occurred by the end of the fifth century BC, which was probably induced by a disastrous climate change. Graphic abstract

The use of a conceptual model of reference and modelling of relevant processes is mandatory to correctly interpret chemical and isotopic data. Adopting these basic guidelines, we have interpretated the unprecedented increase in the H₂S_(g) concentration and the concurrent unexpected decrease in the δ³⁴S value of H₂S_(g) recorded since 2018 in the fumarolic effluents of the Bocca Grande fumarolic vent at Solfatara, Campi Flegrei caldera, in the framework of our conceptual model of the Solfatara magmatic–hydrothermal system. Assuming that the magma chamber situated at depths ≥ 8 km was filled at the end of the 1982–1984 bradyseismic crisis and no refilling episodes took place afterwards, as suggested by gas geochemistry, the concentration and the δ³⁴S value of H₂S_(g) of the Bocca Grande fumarolic effluents are controlled by closed-system degassing of the melt at depths ≥ 8 km and disproportionation of SO₂ in the deep hydrothermal reservoir (6.5–7.5 km depth) hosted in carbonate rocks where H₂S equilibrates. These processes have been active during the last 40 years, but 41.1% (±6.4%) of the sulfur initially stored in the melt (2200 mg/kg) was lost in the 4-year period of April 2018–April 2022. This marked loss of S from the melt in 2018–2022 might be due to the high solubility of sulfur in the melt, which caused its preferential separation during the late degassing stages. These findings are of utmost importance for the surveillance of the Solfatara magmatic–hydrothermal system during the ongoing bradyseismic crisis.

Vesuvio is likely the most if not one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. It is an active volcano, quiescent since 1944. The activity of the Monte Somma and Vesuvio volcanic complex is commonly referred to as two central volcanic edifices, namely Monte Somma and Vesuvio. Nevertheless, the opening of numerous eruptive fissures and related vents have characterized Monte Somma and Vesuvio throughout their lives. Spatter cones, spatter ramparts, and related eruptive fissures are disseminated downslope of Vesuvio’s main cone and on the southern slopes of the volcano. Similarly, cinder cones, spatter cones, and welded spatters are distributed in the sequence cropping out on the Monte Somma cliff and on the northern slopes of Monte Somma. In this work, a total of 168 eruptive vents have been identified and characterized in a GIS environment in which field data have been merged with relevant information from historical maps and documents. These vents have been arranged into units bounded by unconformities (Unconformity Bounded Stratigraphic Units) defining the eruptive history of the volcano. Alignments of vents and eruptive fissures within each unit have been compared with regional tectonic elements and the volcano-tectonic features affecting Monte Somma and Vesuvio during the last 5600 years, thus inferring that different structural trends were active in the different stratigraphic units. In particular, we show that the N300°–320° regional, Apennine, left-lateral, strike-slip fault system, the N040°–055° Torre del Greco direct fault system, the N70° and the EW fault system, and the generally NS oriented group of local brittle elements, all analyzed here, were differently active during the investigated time span. These tectonic trends might control the position of the eruptive fissures and vents in case of future unrest of the volcano.

The CorVo project[1] (Corpora for Volcanoes) aims at building an innovative tool for volcanic risk forecasting, impact assessment, and resilience planning. Exploiting technologies coming from the digital humanities and computational linguistics, a flexible digital interface will be developed to query a body of documents (the CorVo corpus) containing extensive descriptions of the past activity of one of Italy’s most high-risk volcanoes: the Vesuvius. The methodology proposed is an innovative type of approach and the resulting prototype is likely to be extended to other volcanoes in multi-hazard settings.By querying the linguistically annotated corpus, end users (such as Civil Protection units and other stakeholders) will be able to quickly obtain important information from past eruptive scenarios, such as precursors, phenomenology, deposit distribution, and damages, as well as their social impact and the reactions they provoked in the institutions. In this way, they will be able to tackle future emergency scenarios, assess area vulnerability, and plan their response strategies in the best way.In order for the CorVo tool to return useful information, the CorVo corpus linked to it needs to contain a balanced selection of documents that describe the different types of eruptions the volcano may experience: Plinian-type, fissural or mixed (explosive-effusive). Therefore, the first three eruptions that are going to be included in the pilot are going to be the Plinian-type eruption of 1631, the fissural eruption of 1794, and the most recent mixed eruption of 1944. In order to test the validity of the obtained tool, the selected eruptions are in the number of the best-studied Vesuvius eruptions, also from the point of view of the information retrieved from historical sources. The bulk of the documents to be included in the corpus is going to be selected from the BIBV Database (http://libero.area.pi.cnr.it/libbiv/aboutBIV.html). The testing phase of the tool will be carried out in cooperation with other units of the PNRR EPOS MEET project. [1] The CorVo project is funded as Operating Unit CNR-IGG, WP11 Action 11c of the MUR PNRR EPOS MEET project, which started November, 1st 2022.

Archaeomagnetic dating using full geomagnetic vector was performed on three furnaces cropping out at San Genesio archaeological zone, an ancient settlement located in the Arno River plain, near San Miniato (Pisa). The first evidence of human presence in this area dates back to the period between the VI century BCE and 1248 CE, when the village of San Genesio was destroyed by the inhabitants of the nearby castle of San Miniato. Three burned structures were located at different stratigraphic levels. The SGEN01 represents a kiln to produce pottery. The SGEN02 is probably a furnace for domestic use, while the SGEN03 is interpreted as a metallurgic kiln due to the presence of some hematite fragments possibly coming from Elba Island. Both mean paleodirections and absolute intensity were compared with the global geomagnetic model SCHA.DIF4K (Pavón-Carrasco et al., 2021) for Europe. The obtained age intervals at the 65% probability are 846-911 CE for SGEN01, 696-799 CE for SGEN02, and 623-644 CE for SGEN03. These new absolute dates agree well with their archaeological/stratigraphic position and with the history of the archaeological place.