Historical and recent sea level rise and land subsidence in Marina di Ravenna, northern Italy

Abstract

The regions facing the northern Adriatic Sea are particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise. Several trade ports are located there, and the area is important from social and economical viewpoints. Since tourism and cultural heritage are a significant source of income, an increase in sea-level could hinder the development of these regions. One of the longest sea-level time series in the northern Adriatic, which goes back to the late 1880s, has been recorded at Marina di Ravenna, in Emilia-Romagna region. The record is anomalous, showing a rate of increase that largely exceeds that observed in nearby stations. During the last few decades, geodetic campaigns based on geometric high precision leveling, SAR interferometry, and GPS have monitored the Ravenna area. In this work, tide gauge observations are merged with yet unpublished geodetic data, aiming at a coherent interpretation of vertical land movements. We confirm that land subsidence is the major cause of relative sea-level change at Marina di Ravenna, at least during the period allowing for a quantitative analysis (1990-2011). The rate of absolute sea-level change (2.2±1.3 mm yr−1 during the same time period), given by the difference between the rate of relative sea-level change and the rate of subsidence, is consistent with the rate of absolute sea-level change observed by altimetry in the northern Adriatic Sea.

Different processes affecting long-term Ravenna coastal drainage basins (Italy): implications for water management

“…idliv ello= 1414) from 1992 to 2016 for sub-periods: 1992-2000, 2002-2006, 2006-2011, and 2011-2016. The subsidence data were acquired with topographic and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) techniques calibrated on a 2005 topographic survey and a GPS permanent network (Cerenzia et al 2016;Teatini et al 2005). The data were elaborated with the QGIS software to obtain subsidence maps and isokinetics (mm/year) for the different sub-periods.…”

“…The San Vitale basin has been relatively stable in the past 15 years, as shown by the decline of drainage rate in this period. Cerenzia et al (2016) reported that Marina di Ravenna, a town in the San Vitale basin, is recently more stable and emphasized that the forthcoming sub-periods subsidence…”

“…The area has suffered from an intensive subsidence rate, up to a maximum value of 110 mm/year in the 1970s, during the high economic boom due to deep groundwater natural gas withdrawals (Teatini et al 2005). More recently, the rates of subsidence have significantly decreased in many areas due to strong mitigation law imposed on groundwater exploitation (Carminati and Martinelli 2002), but they still remain important in some places like the coastal area (Artese et al 2016;Bitelli et al 2015;Cerenzia et al 2016;Teatini et al 2005). The subsiding land raised the need to pump more water out of the coastal basins to keep pace with the rising groundwater level (Antonellini et al 2019).…”