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Recent seismic events worldwide have demonstrated the high vulnerability of existing school buildings and the urgent need to have reliable tools for the rapid seismic performance assessment and damage and loss quantification. Indeed, the significant damage observed on structural and non-structural components may have a significant impact in terms of direct and indirect losses making critical the recovery of stricken communities. Although a significant amount of work has been done in developing fragility curves for the residential building stock, only few contributions clearly refer to school buildings that significantly differ in terms of the main characteristics from the residential ones. This research work proposes fragility curves for reinforced concrete and unreinforced masonry public school buildings typical of the Italian building stock, based on the damage observed in the aftermath of the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. A comprehensive and unique database including data on damaged and undamaged school buildings (2037 records) in the Abruzzo region was built using data from four different sources. Due to limited amount of data, the fragility curves can be very sensitive to the method adopted for their derivation, thus three different approaches (i.e. empirical, empirical-binomial, heuristic) are considered in the paper and the results are compared. Finally, a direct comparison with fragility curves available in the literature for the Italian residential building stock is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on socio-psychology and economics literature contributions, this paper provides an original conceptual framework examining whether and how natural disasters exert any influence on nuptiality. Scholars suggest that disasters remind people about the transience of life and mortality. This feature triggers shifting towards intrinsic meaningful goals — such as commitment to relationships; at the same time, it fosters people's proximity and support-seeking from their security providing attachment figures and leads to accelerate life transition choices. In this view, disasters are expected to positively impact on people's intentions to marry. Such an effect is evident in case of natural hazards determining slight damage to physical capital (buildings, productive locations, etc.) which have limited economic consequences that do not hamper marriage intentions. Meanwhile, in the case of highly disruptive disasters, these positive psychological pushes are counterbalanced or even exceeded by the negative economic consequences of the disaster, which inhibit marriage intentions. These predictions are supported by an empirical analysis that relies on a difference-in-differences investigation of municipality-level nuptiality data collected in the Abruzzo region of Italy before and after the major 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very primitive ultramafic igneous rocks occur at Mt. La Queglia (Abruzzo, Italy). They form a strongly deformed sill–dyke system now tilted vertically. These rocks were initially classified as alnöite and, subsequently, have been suggested to be a carbonatitic olivine melilitite. However, further investigation and interpretation of these rocks is needed due to the presence of hand-specimen-scale textural variation suggesting a complex petrogenesis. We study the texture, mineral chemistry, and whole-rock geochemistry to define three main rock-types. (1) A brecciated rock with an ocellar texture composed of calcite pseudomorphs after olivine and melilite, plus fresh diopside in a groundmass of mica, aegirine, garnet, calcite, apatite, perovskite, titanate and chlorite. Zoned ocelli in this rock show an amoeboid shape, agglutination, and menisci typical of a plastic state. (2) A quenched rock showing a spinifex texture containing long feathery phenocrysts of cpx and mica suspended in a groundmass of nepheline, aegirine, apatite, Ti–rich magnetite, plus abundant calcite and some K-feldspar and zeolites. (3) A coarse-grained rock is composed of calcite plus intergranular glauconite, a mixture of spinel mineral group and Ti–rich magnetite, accessory barite, pyrite, and chabazite-K. The igneous rocks at Mt. La Queglia show extreme SiO2-undersaturation (33.5–37.3 wt% SiO2), high MgO contents and TiO2/Al2O3 ratios. Rock-type 1 has a lower Mg number Mg# = 100 × [Mg/(Mg + Fe2+)], higher Ca number Ca# = 100 × [Ca/(Ca + Mg)], high Cr (up to 720 ppm) Ni (up to 379 ppm), higher rare earth elements (REE) contents as well as La/Lu ratio, compared to rock-type 2. Perovskite and chromite accumulation seems an important agent during rock differentiation. Rock-type 3 shows REE cross-over with rock-type 2 suggesting light (L)REE concentration in a carbothermal residuum. Mt. La Queglia rocks are an end-member compared to other Upper Cretaceous and Paleogene Italian lamprophyres, suggesting a low degree of melting of a HIMU (a colloquialism for "high-μ"; referring to mantle domains with high 238U/ 204Pb) garnet-bearing mantle source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient human settlements accumulate essential historical, archaeological, and geological information. An example is the St. Angel Cave, which preserves a Romanesque church and a complex of lustral tubs in the Eastern Maiella Massif (Central Apennines of Italy). Historical chronicles and archaeological data show that the church dates to the 10th–11th century. The archaeometry applied to the ceramic, coin, and wooden artefacts resulting from the excavation established a chronology of the periods of use and abandonment of the St. Angel Cave. The layering of architectural elements, changes in style, and alterations of the church structure account for two collapses. The first could be related to the poorly known 1209 earthquake. In addition, we describe the damage and changes to the structure and the use of space caused probably by the 1706 and 1933 earthquakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates site effects for developing predictive models of site response, for both research purposes and future geognostic applications, by using a statistical analysis method to define possible correlations between different kinds of seismological and geological data. The test area is the intermontane Montereale basin (Abruzzo region, Italy), which was investigated for site effects studies and microzonation purposes because it has been affected by the 2016–2017 Central Italy seismic sequence. The available geological and geophysical information include geological profiles, thickness and geometry of the sedimentary infilling, shear-wave velocity profiles, downhole and borehole data. Seismological analysis (such as earthquake and noise spectral ratios, duration lengthening of seismic signals) has been performed to retrieve parameters useful for seismic response. A GIS database has been created to better manage all this information, by georeferencing all the measurement points and results. Finally, Factor Analysis multivariate technique was used to evaluate the most important site effect indicators, in terms of correlation between the involved parameters, and to deduce how the geological context influences their behavior. The performed analysis highlighted the statistical variability of the strong motion, that depends on the position inside the basin, over the Holocene deposits, and on the edges, at the limit between different lithologies. Moreover, some of the correlations between geological and geophysical indicators are strongly coherent with the basin geological features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]