Carlo Doglioni - Biography#

Full CV (2024)

Carlo Doglioni started his studies in geology when the 1976 magnitude 6.5 Friuli earthquake devastated northeast Italy and caused 1,000 deaths. Four years later in southern Italy, Irpinia, another magnitude 6.9 event had 3,000 victims. In both events, a vast population was homeless and the economy was widely disaggregated. It was, for him, more than a science pursuit. It was a duty for him to bring his scientific career in understanding earthquakes in order to eventually minimize the disaster generated by these events. Therefore, studying earthquakes melts together the passion for science with the wish to be useful to society. Carlo Doglioni was born in Feltre, Italy, at the foot of the Dolomites in the Southern Alps. He turned his considerable academic talents toward the study of geology at the University of Ferrara. After obtaining his doctoral degree in 1981, Carlo Doglioni spent the next decade working with professors at Ferrara to publish numerous studies on the structural geology of the Dolomites, along with several sole-author papers on unifying models for thrust belts and plate tectonics. During this period, Carlo Doglioni completed a post-doc at the University of Basel and served as a visiting researcher at Oxford and Rice Universities. These collaborations beyond the Italian Alps inspired him to construct an integrated and dynamic earth model from field, subsurface and geophysical observations.

In 1992, Carlo Doglioni became Associate Professor at Bari University. Adding studies of the Apennines and western Mediterranean to his laboratory, he expanded on his theory that there is a polarity to global tectonics, and that a westward drift of the lithosphere relative to the underlying mantle governs plate motions and provides recognizable, coherent tectonic patterns. An eloquent summary entitled “Geological evidence for a global tectonic polarity” was published in the Journal of the Geological Society, London (1993). After three years as Full Professor at University of Basilicata (Potenza), Carlo Doglioni moved to Rome in 1997 to become Professor of Geodynamics, Sapienza University. As a teacher, he continued to solve local and global tectonic puzzles while he supervised numerous masters’ theses and sixteen PhD dissertations. He and his students researched everything from ancient outcrops to active volcanoes and deep ocean basins (as a member of ODP Leg 161 in 1995). Carlo Doglioni augmented his intense knowledge of Italian rocks with field excursions throughout the northern hemisphere, from Japan to El Salvador, and visits to Rice and Columbia Universities. In recent years he has expanded his research to address the mechanism of earthquakes.

Carlo Doglioni has served in over two dozen commissions, committees, editorial boards, panels and university leadership positions, including two tours as an AAPG Distinguished Lecturer and President of the Italian Geological Society from 2009 to 2014. He has received more than a dozen major awards, including the EAGE Alfred Wegener Award, and was inducted into the Accademia dei Lincei (a prestigious academic institution founded in 1603) in 2009 and the Accademia dei XL (founded in 1782) in 2011. Since 2005 he was also appointed in the Academy of Europe. In 2016, Carlo Doglioni was named President of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), where he has continued his fight to understand the restless earth and bring fact-based science to the public. As he looks to the future, Carlo Doglioni hopes to stimulate research on the environment and new energy resources at INGV and is deeply involved in understanding Italy’s recent seismicity. His ability to create a holistic model from disparate observations served as an example to a large number of students and colleagues all over the world.

Unsatisfied with developing a fresh view of plate tectonics, Carlo Doglioni has turned his attention in this millennium to new areas of research, communication and service. Since 1982, Carlo Doglioni has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed research papers. Google Scholar notes that his papers have been sited over 13,400 times – 5,300 since 2015. As head of INGV, his news interviews and open-forum discussions inform the public and positively impact seismicity research.

According to Carlo Doglioni, in Italy there are two mountain belts, the Alps and Apennines, but they are so different. The Alps are higher, involve deep-seated metamorphic rocks, thick-skinned tectonics is dominant, they have two shallow foredeeps, a thick crust and lithosphere, no back-arc basin and a shallow subduction zone. The Apennines are exactly the contrary, having low topography, one single deep foredeep, the accretionary prism is mostly composed by sedimentary rocks, i.e., dominant thin-skinned tectonics, a widespread back-arc basin and a steep westerly directed subduction zone. In his publications, these asymmetries mimic the differences between the eastern (e.g., Cordilleras, Andes) and the western Pacific subduction zones (Aleutians, Marianas, etc.). All this agrees with the global tectonic polarity, i.e., the westward drift of the lithosphere relative to the underlying asthenospheric mantle detected in any hotspot reference frame and manifested by what he named as ‘tectonic equator’ that is about 28 degrees inclined with respect to the geographic equator. These observations highlight a mainstream of plate motions. According to the candidate, the Gutenberg-Richter law shows how seismicity is globally controlled; therefore, there must be a force at the planet scale fuelling plate tectonics. This supports that mantle convection acts contemporaneously with an astronomical engine and geodynamics is a self-organized chaotic system in which several forces work together.

To put it another way, Carlo Doglioni said the Earth is forever restless and there needs to be a constant vigil on watching and recording that restlessness. “Everything in our environment is controlled by gradients, any type of gradients, e.g., pressure, temperature, electric, chemical, economic, societal, etc. The Earth is alive because it steadily regenerates gradients or is controlled by gradients, either internal or external, maintaining the active system. It is essential to fully understand and quantify those interdependent gradients.”