FACEBOOK live stream from the Triassic

The UNESCO Dolomites Foundation is offering a new Facebook live stream on climate change, this time with an eye to a past that has a lot to say about the present. On Thursday, 25 February at 6 pm, geologist Piero Gianolla and palaeobotanist Evelyn Kustatscher will be connected on the @DolomitesUNESCO page.

The climate is changing… again

As evidenced by the recent discovery of a new mass extinction (see Science Advances, No. 38 of 16/09/2020 where the work of an international team led by Jacopo Dal Corso of the China University of Geosciences is published), the Earth faced a global ecosystem crisis 233 million years ago due to volcanic eruptions that injected enormous quantities of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This was followed by global warming and a loss of biodiversity both in the oceans and on land, one of the most radical extinction events in the entire history of life. Life picked up again where it left off with the appearance of new groups and the rapid diversification of existing ones contributing to the origin of new ecosystems. These phenomena were also studied thanks to that open-air geology book we call the Dolomites which evidently even has something to tell us about the Anthropocene. Geologist Piero Gianolla, a professor at the University of Ferrara and Scientific Consultant to the UNESCO Dolomites Foundation and Evelyn Kustatscher, a palaeobotanist at the South Tyrol Museum of Natural Sciences will discuss this as well as other topics.

Live stream of the major “Dolomites” themes

This is the third Facebook live stream offered by the UNESCO Dolomites Foundation in recent months. These sessions have garnered a lot of interest from users, both in terms of the number of views and in terms of interactions. A discussion of climate change between writer Matteo Righetto and climatologist Roberto Barbiero was already featured in the first live stream. The second live stream focussed instead on one of the repercussions of “climate change”, the transitioning of ski resorts, which was discussed by Andrea Ferrazzi, Director of Confindustria Belluno Dolomiti, Lorenzo Delladio, President and CEO of “La Sportiva”, and Prof. Federica Corrado of the Interuniversity Department of Sciences, Design and Regional Policies at the Polytechnical University of Turin.

Ph. Rita Zandonella, Rifugio Berti Vallon Popera