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Bartolomeo Gastaldi (1818–1879) and the “glacial erratics” of the Torino Hill, NW Italy

  • History of Earth Sciences
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Abstract

In 1850, the Italian geologist Bartolomeo Gastaldi (1818–1879) first documented the glacial origin of the deposits belonging to the Rivoli–Avigliana and Ivrea end-moraine systems (Piemonte, NW Italy) in a joint note with Charles Frédéric Martins. The authors also interpreted as glacial erratics the large boulders, mainly made up of metamorphic rocks, scattered on the Torino Hill, thus envisaging an enormous advancement of Quaternary glaciers, well beyond the position of the two moraine amphitheaters. A decade later, Gastaldi corrected himself and recognised the boulders as derived from the erosion of Miocene marine conglomerates, invoking ice-rafting to explain their presence within marine sediments. This hypothesis was supported by no less an authority than Charles Lyell, who had visited the places in company of Gastaldi in 1857. Gastaldi’s ice-rafting hypothesis implied periods of large glacier development in Southern Europe during the Miocene, and soon entered the debate on the existence and extent of past glacial periods which animated the European geological community in the late nineteenth century.

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Fig. 1

redrawn after Piana et al. (2017)

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Notes

  1. A much shorter version of these results was published the year later on the Edinburgh New Philosophical Magazine (Martins and Gastaldi 1851).

  2. Citations of non-English works reported in this paper are author’s translations from the originals in French (Martins and Gastaldi 1850; Vézian 1876; Sacco 1895) and in Italian (Gastaldi 1863a, b) language.

  3. At the epoch, limestone boulders within the Cenozoic conglomerates were quarried to produce lime. The possibility that loose limestone boulders lying on the soil could have been completely destroyed for the same purpose was ruled out by the authors. The conglomerates—they state—also contain a great amount of impure limestone boulders which cannot be used to produce lime; if the loose boulders derived from the conglomerates—they argued—the boulders made up of impure limestone should be still visible because spared by the exploitation.

  4. These “cailloux erratiques” probably correspond to eluvial–colluvial deposits formed at the expenses of the underlying Miocene beds, or to Pleistocene alluvial deposits locally preserved on the slopes of the Torino Hill (Festa et al. 2009).

  5. At the epoch, the conglomerate-bearing succession of the southern part of TH (including the late Oligocene–Aquitanian Antognola Fm.) was entirely referred to the Miocene.

  6. The serpentinite, marly limestone and granite bodies of the upper Staffora Valley actually are large olistoliths embedded into Upper Cretaceous sedimentary mélanges belonging to the External Ligurian Units (Marroni et al. 2010, with refs.).

  7. As acknowledged by the same Gastaldi, the hypothesis of ice-rafting transport had been used some decades earlier by Venturi (1822), for Miocene conglomerates of the Northern Apennines.

  8. i.e., the Torino Hill.

  9. i.e., the lehm or loess.

  10. Lyell, after an initial enthusiasm, rejected Agassiz’s idea of a large scale Quaternary land glaciation, and explained most of the continental glacial deposits of Northern Europe as ‘drift’ sediments deposited in a marine environment by means of ice-rafting (e.g., Boylan 1998; Summerhayes 2018).

  11. Both terms, in French and Italian, mean “High-lying Stone”, alluding to its perched position above the valley.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Marco Pantaloni and an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources, National Research Council of Italy, Via Valperga Caluso 35, 10125, Torino, Italy

    Luca Barale

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Barale, L. Bartolomeo Gastaldi (1818–1879) and the “glacial erratics” of the Torino Hill, NW Italy. Int J Earth Sci (Geol Rundsch) 110, 1863–1873 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00531-021-02048-2

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