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The ceremony for the “Hell’s Bells Speleo Award 2019” was held on February 26 th 2019, at the Miela Bonaventura Theatre, as part of the Alpi Giulie Film Festival, staged by Monte Analogo. The competition was established in 2012 and thanks to the partnership between the Commissione Grotte Eugenio Boegan and the Società Alpina delle Giulie. The aim of the contest is to reward the year’s finest examples of documentary and reportage on speleology. La Venta received the Golden Bell award for its video entitled “Palawan – River of Mystery”, a co-production with Arte France and Alexis Barbier-Bouvet’s One Planet. The prize was collected by Antonio De Vivo (who led the Palawan expedition) and by Francesco Sauro, who stated how that Palawan trip had been an all-encompassing scientific exploration, involving geologists, biologists, anthropologists and many other professionals. Other prizes awarded during the evening included:
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- Special mention for the video “Lights in the Dark: History and Explorations of the Remeron Cave”, produced by the Gruppo Speleologico Prealpino, directed by Claudia Crema, who collected the award.
- Silver Bell for the video “La Magára, the Secret Collector of Sapwood”, directed by Pino Antonini, who collected the prize, and Vito Buongiorno, Gruppo Speleologico Marchigiano.
It has been a little over two years since Giovanni Badino passed away. While we miss him terribly, his research continues to bear fruit in the form of fascinating articles, albeit necessarily written by his collaborators. This is the case of a recent article – put together by co-author Roberto Chignola – that appeared in the prestigious journal Frontiers in Earth Science. The article describes the results of studies conducted by the two authors on the anemometry of the karst complex of Mount Corchia and is entitled: “Fluctuations of Atmospheric Pressure and the Sound of Underground Karst Systems: The Antro del Corchia Case (Apuane Alps, Italy)”.
GIOVANNI BADINO PUBLISHES STILL
With the Golden Bell, the Puerto Princesa Underground River in Palawan and La Venta together reached another significant milestone for a project on which the association has been working for more than 20 years.
This was a highly technical piece of research that, taking a rigorous approach to the physics and mathematics of the case, analysed the recordings of the air currents of some of the entrances to this large underground complex. The monitoring, carried out using instrumentation developed by Giovanni over many years, shows barometric fluctuations that are manifested as a sort of very low-frequency “sound” that can be rendered audible if listened to in compressed form. It amounts to a sort of “voice” of the cave that can potentially provide indications on its internal structure and its real dimensions, of which the known part – which today covers more than 65 km – certainly constitutes just a small portion. This is a highly original, cutting-edge piece of cave research. It represents very much the type of scientific challenge that Giovanni liked to take on, and which today astonishes us through its revelation of the myriad facets that the subterranean world offers up. The article can be downloaded from the following web address: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00147/full
