0000000000969237

AUTHOR

G Buccheri

Ambiente e clima della Sicilia durante gli ultimi 20 mila anni

Environment and Climate in Sicily over the last 20, 000 years. (IT ISSN 0394-3356, 2010). A series of recent studies shed light on the central Mediterranean, and Sicily, climate and environment, starting from the last glacial maximum (about 20 ka cal BP). In the present paper, we examine most of these works, in order to unravel environmental changes of the past, mainly in terms of temperature, atmospheric pattern, precipitation, vegetation and faunal associations. The climate of the last glacial maximum was characterised by very low temperature and by repeated northerlies penetration, even during summer. Low precipitation values led to a steppe- or semisteppe-like vegetation pattern, domina…

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A GEOSITE TO BE SAVED: THE TYRRHENIAN FOSSIL DEPOSIT ON THE ISLAND OF USTICA

During the 1960s, fossil beds characterized by a tropical-sea malacofauna were discovered by G. Ruggieri and G. Buccheri in the Island of Ustica, on the southern slope of Falconiera hill, 32 m asl. Thanks to the presence of Strombus bubonius and other Senegalese guests, the authors estimated that the molluscan fauna had lived around 125,000 years ago, during the Tyrrhenian stage. Recently on the initiative of the “Centro Studi e Documentazione Isola di Ustica”, a research has been initiated to verify the persistence of sand-layers mixed up with Tyrrhenian fossils, even though, in the last 50 years, that area has undergone great changes, because of earthworks which have sealed the deposit. T…

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